WD-40

Thanks to Science Base

Yoga!!!

Good morning everybody...

I thought I'd let you know, that, since I'ven't been training in the gym since April, now, and the back pain is still annoying me, I started looking for alternatives...

I've been through swimming, which is pleasant but doesn't really help, sauna, ditto,
massages, which actually makes it worse, stretching, which seems to ease the strain.

My last attempt is Yoga, a dynamic form of it known as Ashtanga, which I see in truth
as nothing more than a series of stretching exercises chained to each other. I'm certainly not the spiritual kind of guy, even if Marie is making fun of me saying that in a few months I'll be dressing with an orange robe and converting people in the streets... LOL...

anyway, let's see how it works out. the book I'm learning from was heavily discounted
, 3 €, so let's hope it's good... ciao a tutti!

Ooops!!!

It looks like Pfizer has tripped over a CV safety problem with their new (wannabe) blockbuster drug.

Torcetrapib, a compound suppose to reduce (bad) cholesterol production, turned out to cause more heart attacks than it would prevent, possibly due to pressure raising.

This goes a long way to show the importance of my last six months of work. Good feeling. Although I feel bad for Pfizer... Well, not exactly bad, but you know... May be they'll want to hire me, though?

Today's news

Lazy sunday. woke up kind of late, and read the e-newspaper before going out. Here's the news that caught my attention Today.

Supporting Boys or Girls When the Line Isn’t Clear




One Threat Averted but More Await G.M.

U.S. Investigating Graphic Chip Makers

With Economics in Mind, City Takes Aim at Movie Piracy

A Russian Skyscraper Plan Divides a Horizontal City



After a Shooting, a Rapper Stages a Protest in Rhyme

May be...

The sasquatch exists? Darren Naish, over at Tetrapod Zoology, has an extensive disamina of all pros (a lot, apparently) and cons (none to date?) regarding the Sasquatch, or Bigfoot, the american version of the abominable yeti...

Personally, I've always thought that both (sasquatch and yeti) were fraud of some sort, but if what he says checks out, then it could be better to have a second look. I do not, of course have the knowledge to participate to the hunt/search/investigation...
but will be happy to wait for the results.

Something that crossed my mind is: and if they were the last remnants of neanderthals? Actually I have no idea whether Neanderthals did ever live so far from europe.
mah?

have no idea. anyway, have a go and read darren's post.

The plague of our times...

We non-Us citizen don't know any of these two symbols. neither do americans of the one on the right. But the one on the right is very well known to them, being their Civil Defense agency logo. But now, the company has changed name, and they say the logo is a relic of the cold war. as a matter of fact, it is not, it is much older. It's been there since 1939.

Anyway, what's wrong with it? it's easy to recognise, and I guess much easier to print on blankets, and other emergency things than the one ion the left, which in my opinion is too frilly, composed of too many things and excessively elaborated... like most modern logo...

I understand commercial companies wanting to change their logo to keep up with time. But they tend to get simpler, not more complex, easily discernible things in the sea of information by which we are submerged every day. If I can compare, look at the old Total logo:



Now look at the new one.



the new one wants to represent I don't know, a swirl of different kind of energies swooping around the world... oh please, it doesn't make sense. it's more complicated than the old one, again too elaborated, and it requires too much time to be recognised while your brain is busy with driving. as a result, i expect that since they changed the logo, their service station are receiving less visits (tie')

The only company I know of who actually went from a difficult logo to a simpler one is... guess who? yes. Apple.

they went from this:



to this:



see? easier. the new logo is less complex, yet more modern than the old one a bit too 'seventy' with all those colors.

yet, the case for the CD logo is different. the new logo has not just the graphical aspect of an airline company, as a professional said. It has words in it!!! for christ sake it's a logo!!! if you feel the need to put words in it, other than the company/agency name, it means that:

a) it's not a logo - if it has a motto in it, it is a standard. and for you not to be able to understand this,
b) you're a moron, an incompetent, especially if a chemist is better able than you to grasp the meaning of all this. or you're a bureaucrat or were hired by one, and then really there's no hope for you. or him.

enough complaining. i'll point you to the original NYTimes piece.

And, before I forget...

I've finally joined the fan of Babylon5, an old-ish SciFi TV series which tells the story of a space station in deep space, whose name is Babylon 5 indeed.

the station has been built by the human government ten years after a war, as a place to peacefully work out the differences between the various sentient species in that quadrant of galaxy.

It's very intelligently done, with a strong focus (for the two episodes that I've managed to see until now) on the politics, even if some issues are still resolved using fists, a` la captain Kirk way... sigh... it must be some legal requirement in the US, a minimum of physical violence in every tv show or movie.

but if you look beyond that, the outdated cheesy CGI effects, and other ingenuities, you'll surely appreciate the finesse of the characters, the fact that some aliens aren't humanoids unlike star trek, and a general air of freshness and care in painting the world.

I wish I had discovered it before, but I was too afraid that it was too similar to Star Trek, tv series which I personally find !@#$%^& and sincerely hate, as much a sstar Wars, for having hijacked the term SciFi to indicate just childish space-operas with very little brain. If I hadn't, I would have looked at Battlestar galactica with a very different eye.

It's beginning...

the second age of newspapers... I received today an email from NYTimes Online asking whether I wanted to install their new fancy e-reader (beta-version). It's supposed to resize font and style accordingly to dimension and resolution of the screen where it's been looked at. All good and well, pity that I can't download it from work, since we're stuck with Win2K (the beta is 4 WinXP only). And I mostly read it from work, the home laptop has XP but I rarely if ever surf the net from there. It's mostly used for downloading, and watching movies... (you can't prove anything!!!)

But I do appreciate the NY Times, as the regular readers of the blog know. therefore, I'm happy if they work out a better way to bring me the news, and ensure their future in the up and coming World wild web... ;-)

The Wii gets good press

the NYTimes, no less, praise Nintendo for its innovative moves, at the same time that it squashes Sony for ditching the vibration from its controllers to make space for motion-sensitivity, a late-added feature almost not used by the unimaginative ps3 games...

GO!, Wiii!!!

A visit from Google...

someone from google hit the next random blog button, and jumped on my blog! here's the proof:

I'm poor!!!

Oh pants, had to pay the second tranche of my hideously heavy insurance... sigh... half of my salary down the drain (in a sense).

next year, if I have not made any good use of them, I'm going to ditch all the expensive options I choose to cover my ass from my inexperience as a driver. I figure that if i do not crash during the first year, after driving in excess of 20 thousand km, then I am not such a bad driver and can do without the complete-full-cover-casco-total=4=dummies thing.

let's cross my fingers and hope that I'm not going to make use of the damn insurance anytime soon... :-(

War of the World

No, it's not a reprint of the seminal science fiction book by HG Wells, the last book I cherry-picked from the NYTimes 2006 Notable Books List.

It's a reasoned retelling of the last century, certainly the bloodiest in human history. What in the opinion of the author caused it, and possibly how to avoid that the next century will follow suit(does this makes sense?).

A review's comment by which I was particularly striken is this: absurd for us to remember the cold war fondly as a time of peace and stability'' when ''between 1945 and 1983 around 19 or 20 million people were killed in around 100 major military conflicts.

Funny, I was wondering exactly along the same lines yesterday, under the shower (yes I do sometimes sing, too)... My reflection was more concerned with the fact that the United states, even after the end of WWII, have been almost constantly busy, in one way or another, in one or the other part of the world, from (south) east asia in the Fifties-to-Seventies, to Central-and-latin Americas later on, and finally the Middle-East in the last twenty years... am I missing some place?

what next? China is certainly rising up fast, both economically and as a major concern for the stability of the surrounding area. But frankly I can't see the US and their compadres cutting themselves off from the most promising future market...

My political clout is unfortunately too limited to make more educated guesses. Time will tell, I believe... How did that nasty proverb said: I wish you to live in interesting times... yeah, right, thank you very much...

Programming The Universe

And here's the second book which I did select from NYTimes 100 Notable books of 2006.

The idea of the universe as a giant computer isn't entirely novel, and no, it was not created by Matrix... If any, authorship should be awarded to Douglas Adams, writer of The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy. he did limit the idea to planet Earth as the planet-sized (duh!) computer in charge of computing the Final Question to Life, Universe and Everything.

Seth Lloyd just extended the idea, frankly... anyway, here it is. may be I'll buy (into) it. maybe not. what makes me uncomfortable about the idea of the universe as a computer (or the result of a program execution within an all-encompassing computer, if you want) is that, seen in this way, everything we do HAS a meaning, it is necessary and part of a pre-ordered master plan pointing to a final end. now, pardon my doubts, but I am hard-pressed to think that may casual yawning has a meaning. more than uncomfortable, it plain scares me... uh... :-|

for my european friends, the book is also available from my preferred online shop, Play.com

Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii...

Apparently, the new Wii is as good as I was hoping. The new Zelda too.

but mind you, potato couches may need to exercise more, before tackling on the new control system, since it makes you move so much that you can suffer muscle injuries...

Self-Made Man

Here's a nice idea for a book (already pblished, I'm afraid). The accounts of a girls experience at cross-dressing and passing herself as a man... The author, Norah Vincent, spent one year living as a man...

I'm interested enough that I'd be willingly to buy it, especially 'cause she doesn't seem to let her lesbianism come in the way of an impartial view of the thigns she experienced... ;-)

Best(?) Book of 2005?

May be they're not the best in absolute sense (I believe this would be a very personal assessment), but the NY Times doesn't call them that way: Just 100 notable books of the year 2005. Which I guess is very reasonable. I just wish I had the time to read at least 20% of them. But I'll be happy with my 1 or 2%...

I'll be posting the one that caught my attention, and I plan to read...

Plus, don't limit yourself to this year. they have selections for the previous years too...

Ann Coulter WHO?

A nice piece on the NY Times book section reviews three books which make Ann Coulter their subject. This political commenter contributes to inflame american politics with vitriol laced comments (duh!) about liberals.

The piece interestingly points out the weak approach of all three books in tackling the coulter phenomenon, with the authorsfocusing on her and rebutting her arguments, rather than exposing her as a pre-digester of political news for conservatives. read more here.

Toxicity, toxicity...

This is what I am studying today...

I'm reading the hand-outs of a seminar a colleague attended (thanks Ron!). This way, I will at least understand what all those acronyms, that people use here at work, mean.

things such as the difference between NOEL (No Observed Effect Level) and NOAEL (No Adverse Observed Effect Level), S2A studies (genotoxicity)...

all very interesting, and even the 'boring' parts about regulatory organs and institutions are kind of interesting...

Hopefully, I'll attend the course later next year... or may be I'll skip over for a more advanced one, who knows?

a nice quote:

"You too can be a Toxicologist in two easy lessons, each of ten years [lenght]" - Arnold Lehman (ca 1995) :-)

BBC: My Sci Fi Life

BBC is and will always be my preferred TV broadcast. I'm convinced that when everything will run through the net and the term 'broadcasting' will be a thing of the past, they'll still be alive and kicking (asses).

As for my beloved Sci-Fi, since the sixties they've been the producers of series which put to shame most contemporary american blockbusters, series which, like the best sci-fi, are there to provoke thought, to explore possibilities, alternatives to our current state, to guess how we may react when facing unusual problems.

Now, BBC is letting their viewers comment on their preferred series from the past.

I myself did discover a few series I was not aware of, such as Star Cops. I did know The Prisoner, though, having downloaded the first few episodes some months ago.

enjoy!

wasting my time...

I've been out of work until mid-day... was working on my PhD thesis, this weekend, and finally managed to put an end (and one more piccies in) to Chapter eight. yesterday and this morning, I polished up chapter one and two, which are now final. I guess I'll just have to print them. Then I've come here at work, tried to read some DMSO/Solubility review, but mostly hushing away my time while I wait for 16.30h, when I'll meet Dr Bertrand Piccard, who DID NOT command the Enterprise. No, that would be Jean Luc. this one was merely the first man to complete a whole non-stop (I believe) tour of the world in an aerostatic baloon.

He's been invited here to talk about determination and balancing your work life. I guess HR people do actually get something right, from time to time... when they're not busy figuring out the mode of action of Smartolan... :-{

IceSkating...

I did wait a lot bvefore finally managing to go ice skating in the turnhout Ice rink, this weekend. unfortunately, my GF was working, so I tagged along with an old-time friend of mine. fact is, we must have looked like a gay couple, skating together in the middle of families... or even worse, two pedophiles :-0

well, I'll try to make up one of the coming weekends, I really like to do it even if I'm not particularly good at it. it's fun and a good way to spend one hour on saturday night.

Vroommm!!!

Just thought I would amuse you with this nice spot from...

Audi...

One year ago...

one year ago... something changed in my life. 'nuff said.

to the future!

Loas Angeles looses its frondes...

from the NYTimes: Los Angeles has decided that palm trees are too difficult to mantain, don't clean up the air and don't offer shadow as other (native) varieties, so they're getting rid of them in the future. that doesn't mean that you'll be seeing people wandering with chainsaw, bringing them down. They'll just wait for them to die, and they'll replace them with other, more shadowy varieties.

Incivil shopping

Thanksgiving id the unofficial start of the holiday shopping season in the US.

and some shops open earlier than usual, like 5 a.m. they also give away doorbusters, heavuly discounted attractive items to lure people in.

things didn't go as they hoped, in NY, though, where people looking for the best bargains did descend into fistcuffs...

how lame...

Inchoatus

I hoped to have found a serious source of indipendent sci-fi reviews. but not. these guy(s) don't weven know how to properly write in english, so how can they pretend to review other people's works? *sneers*

pity 'cause they do have some points to score.

The Dreaming Void

Peter F. Hamilton, the new space-opera idol of brit SF, has posted another update of his one-post-per-month blog.

He was afraid of having lost the usb-key where he stores his writing notes. Would it appear on eBay? or would the guy who found it be inspired by it, and write up a new Dreaming void and publish before him? we'll never know, since he's found it back...

it goes on detailing some bits about his work. Paula myo makes her reappearance, things of which, personally, I'm not particularly enthusiastic.

never liked her, and was hoping some new characters would find space in the old-age oppressed, asfittic(?) world of the Commonwealth.

BattleStar Galactica

I've seen Episode eight. I believe I've seen enough of the whole series, to draw my conclusions now.

and in essence they're negative. The original idea was good, with the sudden shock of almost total annihilation of Humankind, and the merciless hunt of the survivors by the cylons...

I could endure the little stupidities, and pretend that some things just didn't happen, fill in the plothole with my imaginations, the same way I pretend to mentally improve the environment where the characters play. I can imagine a properly built spaceship, and not something where the only difference with a nimitz-class air carrier is that doors are slopy... :-\

I did enjoy the humanity of the characters in the first series, and forgave the bad sides thinking that it would get better and better with time. But no, oh no, it's gone down the other way...

frankly, the only thing I'd save of the whole new series is the dogfighting scenes, but there's way too little of them to make up for the rest.

in this episode, just to stay on the detail, we see how the cylons are not only intelligent, and vicious, they seems to have a kind of supreme simulation power. How could they possibly know that BullDog would end up trying to kill the old Adama, when the reason for that (i.e. that adama itself shoot him up) was unknown to anybody but himself?) and even so, it's kind of a far fetched attempt at assassination, from an enemy that has shown that they could get rid of humanity once and for all, if only they wanted. I mean, they should have just nuked the humans while they were grounded on new caprica...

bah...

and the science in the series, purposed by Gaius baltar, is tacky and fake like, I don't know. just fake... unbelieveble. the guy is an idiot, and his only skill seem to be a mutant power who makes people around him think he's a genius, humans and cylons alike.

I much better like The 4400, where with some little exception like the mutation of episode 11/12, the science is treated a bit fairly, and even when it's not it's easy to see through it and just get along with the story... and most of all, they manage to keep me on the edge with just a good use of the story, and revelations, not with pointless space actions...

pity third season has ended, and I can't find ep 13 anywhere. but never mind...

tonight, it's Desperate housewives night. :-P

At the Confluence of Science and Technology

That's how I felt today, during a three hours meeting where all my colleagues presented their work... Pityt I can't tell you about all the things discussed.

Also, I understood that there's still a lot I have to learn before being on a par with them.

That's good. it's going to be two more interesting years...

Now, back to work...

How did whales came about?

Olduvai George tells us. with pictures!

thanks to Pharyngula

I am not a celebrity...

sigh...

may be I don't post enough. or may be I just don't post enough interesting things...

I don't know, but I'd rather live my life, than blog it...

yes, the fox and the sour grapes... :-|

(may be I'm more of an L-List blogger. L as in Looser :-)

weel, at least I do have sense of self-humour

World's largest democracy

that would be India... but this piece from the NY Times suggest otherwise, at least on some fronts...

lack of self-critics and extrajudicial killings are still common, and the idea that a wife is killed every 77 seconds by her hisband for failing to bring home sufficient dowry (dote?) is altogether repulsing to me.

still, it happens.

I hope things will get better, there and in china. If these two countries are going to rule the world, one day, we all better hope so...

who owns that land?

An interesting piece of the NY Times (again) about the portion of land which Israel illegally occupies in the west bank. Illegally since it's privately owned by Palestinians, and therefore, under international law, Israel should support their claims...

clic the title to read the article. you may need to register though. free as in beer, if you don't value your personal data...

How to waste our time...

Ah ah, I can't believe the frustrated guy(s) waiting the whole night for amazon to put up the Nintendo Wii for sale... and most of them didn't even catch one.

they thought they'd be smarter, and warmer than their geek-friends waiting in queues in front of 'real' stores... only they did have no idea on how long the virtual queue was. nor whether they were at the front of it, or at the back end...

For me, I'll wait for the Wii to come down in price after six months or more... I love Nintendo's games, but it's not as if I have plenty of time to play with them right now, do I?

and hey, does it play dvd/xvid/divx? anybody knows?

(from the NY Times)

Muton! Muton! Muton!!!

I keep receiving hits coming from a blog which I linked long time ago, when I foudn out about the Hyena's oddness...

I went back to the same, to discover that there's a new phallic-post*: the author just discovered a phallus impudicus in his garden. This is a particularly stinky mushroom with very strong resemblance to an erect penis, as the picture in his website can testify.

This mushroom also has other interesting aspects, such as its tremendous force when coming up from the ground. Apparently, it can break through tarmac, exerting a force of 1.33KN (that is, it can lift a person weighting 133Kg. next time you feel something pushing you from the floor, move aside... :-)

*: it's not that I'm particularly interested in phallic posts, mind you. It's just that the coincidence was quite surprising.

if you want some less phallic posts, just scroll the blog up and down :-)

it's not that I am busy...

Ok, I am, so I post less and less...

too much to do these days, frankly... new unforeseen tasks keep popping up at the last minute, and old deadlines are still there...

ouch...

hopefully, I'll be able to surf the net a lil bit so that I can post you some fancy thing... in the meantime, why don't you find your favorite gadget? http://www.paramountzone.com/

I like the cup warmer (it's looking for one that I found the website - too often I brew a tea cup and then I'm swamped by things to do, and when i can get bak to it, the mug is cold...)

and ten it's done...

a long weekend, two days sent writing, two other days spent resting, and the tenth chapter is finally done. good...

now, it's back to correcting and recorrecting the other chapters...

booring...

and I also have to go to work during a holiday day 'cause my damn calendar still plays funny and didn't show the holiday. so some people bokked me a meeting for this af'noon... pants...

I really want to get rid of all this... may be PAC's aspiration of living and working as a sea lamps guardian isn't too bad...

ciao...

Kemplerer Rosettes

here's something that I've always wanted to be able to do: solar system building... do you know about lagrangian points? if you don't, and you aren't really interested, then I'd suggest you to skip to the next post. But if you are, and you happened to read Larry Niven's Puppeteers saga, aka "The known space", youll love this website...

let's see if I can embed one of the java applets... YES!!! click on it, and start the simulation ;-)

impressive, isn't it? the two planets at the lagrangian points are in stable positions, but since their mass is a little too much compared to the central one, they become unstable with time... and one of them ends up thrown away from the system (the pink one)

now be good boys, and visit the page linked there's much more fun to be had!!!

(and this includes a kemplerer rosetta of 48 planets!!!)

Home, sweet home...

No work today... as promised, I'm at home, enjoying the many vacation days left in my pocket thanks to the crazy elgian work system...

all of us at work have so many days to take that we don't know how to do... I mean, there's work to be done...

anyway, here I am, in my salon writing up my thesis... I've corrected/extended a good chunk of chapter ten, science is fun 'cause while reading what you wrote jus some days ago, and back then it did look allright, you're brought to question yourself.

yeah, right, all this I'm reading sounds good, but how do you justify these assertions? and then, down to extend, show your data in new ways, inventing new analysis methods, and so on...

it's heavy, but it's fun, serious!!! I swear!!! wanna take a piece?

I know i'm like Tom Sawyer in front of that palisade, convincing other boys that painting was cool and they would be moron if they didn't want to pay him to have the opportunity of painting a tiny bit.

so here I am, is there anybody who wants to give me a hand with my thesis? let's say, correct one or two paragraph? :-D

never mind, I'll manage myself...

Sea Spiders

First, I didn't know they existed... if I were to tell my ex, she'd never go to the sea again (ah ah!!!)... In second place, they seems rather interesting (evo-devo-speaking) creatures...

click on the link to discover more about their origins :-)

I'm busy busy busy today

Tomorrow it's holiday (kind of, I'll spend the next two days writing up the damned tenth chapter of my thesis), and I had a deadline last monday which got pushed 'cause of unforeseen tasks to perform... anyway, here I am blogging in the nook and crannies of pipeline pilot scripting... and swearing all the way since some databases don't want to behave...

I leave you with a funny picture:

Geo-Stationary Banana Over Texas

wow, now that's an idea...

a banana-shaped baloon to float above Texas' atmosphere... I guess they want to hint something...

Isn't he cute?

a new mammal has been found in Laos, a member of a class thought to be extionct 11million years ago... isn't he cute? a rat-squirrel...



I want one... that is, if it can be bred in captivity... wouldn't that be someting? unlike many animals, it would escape extinction by becoming a pet...

thans to PalaeoBlog

Pearls Before Swine

Whatever this may mean... it's a very funny on-line comic. unfortunately, only the last month can be read for free, but it will provide you with a funny half hour. enjoy!

chimpanzees aren't

the most intelligent primates... surprisingly (for me at least), a new paper has come out that ranks primates' average cognitive abilities as tested bya series of tests. Orang-utans arrive first... chimps are only second, and blah blah... full list below;

1. Orang-utan
2. Chimpanzee
3. Spider monkey
4. Gorilla
5. Surili
6. Macaque
7. Mandrill
8. Guenon
9. Mangabey
10. Capuchin
11. Woolly monkey
12. Gibbon
13. Baboon
14. Slow loris
15. Night monkey
16. Ruffed lemur
17. Brown lemur
18. Fork-marked lemur
19. Ring-tailed lemur
20. Bushbaby
21. Squirrel monkey
22. Mouse lemur
23. Marmoset
24. Talapoin

we don't feature in the list, you might have noticed... possibly 'cause we don'ty really belong there...

I wonder how did they weight the importance of different tests. I guess they say it in the paper, but I don't have the time to read it...

Mapping my friends... again...

In the morning...

...what's best than a Hot Cup Of Joe? PalaeoAnthropology a go-go, babe... ;-

Kiwi!!!

a moving movie...



they can really fly!!!

My bro's place

let's see if I can manage to show it on the map...

Jeremy Clarkson reviews the BRERA!!!

Jeremy Clarkson blurbs and rants about global warming for the first part of his weekly commentary on Times Online. Sigh! I wish I could believe him, but quite frankly, I can't. On the second part, tough, he introduces us to his thoughts about Alfa prettiest coupe... the Brera...

I've seen it a couple of times at the dealer, and zooming around the city... very pretty car, although it looks kind of heavy...

ciao ciao... more news to come about my weekend, when I get round to it...

Hunters of Pangea

Stephen baxter introduced some dinosauroid (anthropomorph dinosaurs) in his book Evolution, as a nice aside to the main plot of primates evolution... His charcaters were most likely inspired by the (fictitious) dinosauroid reconstruction made by Russell & Séguin (1982), in turn inspired by the novel The Dragons of eden by carl Sagan (must get it).

The dinosauroids were popular some time ago, and I saw them for the first time in Riddle of the Dinosaur by John Noble Wilford.

Now, Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology has a wonderful post about them, and how much they were likely to have (not) existed...

pity... Anyway, i'll buy baxter's book once it's out.. for the moment, enjoy the Dinosauroids!

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?