you read well. not TO india, but FROM india... apparently, faced with a shortage of skilled labourers in the arts conservation business, india will outsource part of the workload to private agencies elsewhere... funny uh? we export high tech (and call centre) jobs there, and they export back... original post from The history Blog. What? did you think that I only read about science and stuff?
I thought I'd share this. a three hours long documentary about the Theory Of Everything (TOE), Strings and hidden dimensions. Haven't watched it yet, but looks good.
or, more exactly, mammories... I bought a new T-shirt on saturday: the drawing on it is... well, here's a picture of it:
the picture of the little mammal sucking his mother's tits got me thinking... how's it that cows have their mammories close to the hind legs, while women have them closer to the upper part? I can see a clear advantage for the primates to have nipples on the upper body - it make it easier to keep their infants with the hands - young veils/zebras/antelopes do instead walk on their own...
but... how the position of the nipples is decided during development? I always thought they were 'linked' to the chest, but that's very anthropomorphic... I wish I had an evolutionary biologist at hand to ask him... may be I should contact Richard Dawkins... or may be PZ Myers will answer...
just back from the ardennes, where I did my first twenty km of kayaking... it's incredibly nice but I would go somewhere else if I were you... too many people in Dinant, there were something like 1k kayaks on the river, it did look like a city centre traffic jam... no capsizing, nor other unpleasant events, for me at least. pictures to come later on... have a nice week. and Go!, Italy!!!
here I am again... to suggest you another blog to check out: Aetiology, by Tara Smith. it's part of SEED's scienceblogs constellation, and extremely interesting: it talks about bacteria, diseases, and such... from both a medical, and biological / evolutionary perspective... well, see you soon... you know I'm going to post again, right?
the previous movie-related post started something in my mind... which book/comic would you like to see (decently) translated in celluloid by next year? if I were to pick one right now, I'd probably say The Reality Disfunction. there's enough material to shoot three movies, there's plenty of charismatic charachters (Al Capone, for God's sake), plenty of Hollywood-style action, spaceships, whole fleets of them, anti-matter weaponry, culture clashes (between Adamists and Edenists), and then more: Nanotech, Aliens, there's even Zombies!!! it's a free-for-all extravaganza. and it also works out pretty well. There's a princess in a high castle, although the blue prince is a bit on the cheap side, and at the end he goes with another girl - good old fashioned english upper class girl... did hamilton manage to leave anything out? it's "The importance of being Earnest" meets "Gone with the Wind" meets "Battlestar Galactica"... Uhm, I better go to work now... but if you want to jot down your favorite conversion, please do so. and good afternoon ;-)
yesterday I went to see a movie... any movie, "she" said... of course in belgium movies are either in french (dutch subtitles) or english (dutch and french subtitles - essentially, half of the screen is wasted)... that does not make me particularly enthusiastic about going to movies, I have to say, coupled with the exceptionally belgian attitude that, after paying the ticket to enter the cinema. they expect you to pay if you go to pee, too. crazy people... I just hate that.
anyway, due to my languages restrictions, only movies in english were in the rose of candidates... and I already saw CARS (good!), and Ice Age 2 (not so fresh anymore)... not that my sweet half would compromise on going to see cartoons, of course they're for children... yeah right. have a look at Barefoot Gen... Oh God I lost my thread... Oh yeah I remember, ok long story short, I went for 'The Da Vinci Code'. I know it was stupid of me, but could not resist... I mean, ok Yom Hanks is in it, and that's a big minus, but Sir Ian "Magneto" McKelln, and most important of all Audrey Tatou!!! Oh yeah and that frenchman, what's his name? Leon... Uhm no... not really...
Anyway, went in very much convinced that i was going to be bored to death... and I was not!!! I thought I was going to laugh at the risible plot, after a dear friend told me that in Agels and demons CERN is depicted like a double-face organisation kind of the X-Men academy, sporting a mach 15 jet... well I was expecting to see crazy things like the pope slaugghtering people with a light saber jumping up and down inside san pietro. kind of Yoda in SW ep III. well may be not that crazy... None of all this instead. a very measured and well paced plot, even if too long... Martin Mystere would have managed to fit it within 140 pages, I'm sure... it actually did...
never mind however, it's a movie that you can relax in the armchair and enjoy. but I have not read the book, so please don't come and say "It was soo different"... Hunt for red october was incredibly different from the book, but it still is a good movie. as it is V4Vendetta, despite its dissimilarity form the comic book...
Ok, have a nice day you all (two o three person I presume) who are reading this blog...
Gufo a.k.a. Luca a.k.a. The Menace (by janssenn's girls apparently- someone has been spreading rumors, damn him)
Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't have gone to biology, rather than chemistry, during my studies. It certainly seems so from my interests... just have a look at the previous posts in this blog... and the books I read, and those of you who knows me in person
know how much time spend wondering about dinosaurs and such stuff... a lot...
well, I wanted to do biology or physics but the first one wasn't very promising at my place, and the second one was out of discussion - no physics degree at my place, and not enough money to go anywhere else. So I did chemistry, good compromise in between the two and with good employment perspectives... and after the Comp Chem specialisation I've been slowly transitioning to biological sciences... with a computational twist all the way around...
who knows what the future holds for me?
Here's an interesting piece from Tara Smith at Aetiology. A Plague outbreak in Republic of Congo... She already told us about a woman in california who got plague some time ago... Check out her blog 'cause it's incredibly interesting... (and she's pretty and has tattoos too) :-)
And if you want to help out with the outbreak, I guess you can do your part sending money to Medecins sans Frontieres...
where your gills have gone, when your grand-grand-parents became ground-walking animals and didn't need them anymore? Until now, in my ignorant chemistry-oriented world vision, I assumed they became our lungs... but no, actually. they became our neck glands, and face muscles, and part of the jaw... I mean, how cool is that?
Interesting idea, but I'd rather have started a Lorentz's butterfly farm to become all-powerful king of storms...
hey, some people at UCL have discovered that we use the same part of the brain to speak different languages... it just switches back and forth from different modes... I could've told them so
from long ago, since now that I know english, every time I try to speak french
some english words trickle down with it... I guess my brain's switching system doesn't work properly... my parents would probably say that this isn't a surprise, either...
and I've finally bought my own car... a second hand one, just to start... but not a city car, as it happens. after having tried the yaris didn't really like it...
so went for a 156 sport wagon...
juan, I'm ready to bet that I could beat you up the mountain with this... and don't worry, I'll let you have the cheese... but I have to admit I forgot to send it last time I went down. my fault. too much messing around to get the driving license done...
bye bye to everyone
Darren Naish is a tetrapod paleontologist at Univ of Portsmouth, not far from where I did my own PhD (good old Soton). He has quite a few interesting things to say about rabbits (my friend at the rabbit's lair would love this, although he probably already knows) and many other tetrapods...
and now, it's time for a little cross-posting from pharyngula:
Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass
old, but always funny...
and here I am again... Recently, I have been catching up on my Science Fiction, ater so much time spent reading real science. so, it's been the time of Evolution, a majestic plot which takes something like one billion years to unwindle, following a dinasty of primates from small critters at the foot of dinosaurs to man, to an ending I don't want to reveal... it certainly is interesting, although some of the theories exposed inside I don't particularly agree with, especially after reading the red queen... but it's an interesting read, although may be a little below Baxter standards. Too much time is spent, in my opinion, on the 'human' persons (I actually skipped this part ah ah) and I'd have loved to see something more on the primeval mammals, who scuttled at the feet of dinosaurs since 200 millions years ago... but hey, may be I'll get to write my own book about them, one day...
the part I appreciated most where those about the Antarctica T-Rex (cool), but most of all the
brief story about the Jurassic Hunters, intelligent and self-aware dynosaurs who hunted diplodocus and made simple tools... I wish he could extend on them... and I wish I could know whether something of what we are doing now will be left over to be found by our successors in another hundred million years...
Now, I'm almost done with stephen johanson's book Lucy's Child: The Discovery of a Human Ancestor. I'm reading it in the italian version, though. excatly the same book I read when I was fourteen and started my long lasting interest in paleonthology/paleoanthropology...
Hi everyone,
this is my first day as a commuter... well, as a car commuter, since until now I did the same
but by bus. so, to be sure I could find an easy spot to park my unwieldy Audi A4, I decided to get to work at... 6.30AM!!! OMG...
So, if you happen to pass in Belgium, be aware that the fifth Apocalypse Horseman has been unleashed!!! Wroooommm...
Think again.
and now I do understand a friend of mine when he used the expression "To suffer like a hyena"...
Hyenas really got the long end of the stick (pun intended)
Exactly as it says on the title, there's more than my driving license. Work is proceeding well, I'm building and veryfying new models regarding Cardio vascular effects of would-be drugs, and have also started providing service to some 'real' chemists. Someone from Spain asked my (my model's) opinion on the CV activity of four drugs. And one of them is seemingly active on two out of three indicators... my first useful and practical contribution to Drug Design, other than the Methodology Development which was my PhD's primary aim.
here you can see it in pictures or check where they came from.
Plus, added Google Analytics
