Anatomy of a Balloon Animal

I am stealing this post from the beautiful Streetanatomy blog:

Anatomy of a Balloon Animal

Cut-Off from the grid...

Some people are resorting to cell-phone jammers, illegal in the states (and elsewhere too), to avoid being pestered by loud people conversing close-by.

So say the NY Times.

I believe that the right of a person to enjoy silence is stronger than the right of another person to communicate when it is not strictly necessary...

What do you think?

I want to do it too!!!

I want to climb the kilimanjaro like the NY Times correspondent.

Oh, and between the various news, the NY Times is now on Facebook.

FreeRice.

Do something fun. Guess the synonym of the words on the screen, and climb to harder and harder levels. 40 of them overall.

Do something good. for every correct answer, the sponsor of the game will donate ten grains of rice through the United Nations. It's not much, but every little helps.


my level right now: 32 - I've donated 500 grains so far. At 20mg x grains, it's less than a hundred grams though.

thanks to Versus Itaca for the link.

Laelaps is on Scienceblogs!

Congrats to Brian!!!

You all, go and read his wonderful piece on Dinosauroids (or rather, lack of).

E' morto Enzo Biagi.

Che altro c'e' da dire?

Somewhere over the (B)rainbow

Colours light up brain structure

Neuronal circuits can now be seen in a multicolour 'brainbow'.

A mix of 5 colours can produce about 90 distinct shades.

Nature (once again) has a wonderful paper about a new coloring technique able to randomly color every neuron with about 90 different shades so that their wiring can be seen more clearly.

Here it is, better written than I ever will be able to.

Did you really write that paper?

It happens sometimes that the job done by a single scientist get published with more than his name on it. He's usually the first author, except in Italy and other third world countries, where some professors pretend them to be on top. He's relegated to second place, unless the professor above has a favorite pupil who needs a push to get/stay into the tenure track.

Anyway, this post is not about unjust usurpation of authorship at the hand of elder academics. It is rather on the careless co-authorships practiced in some research groups, where all those belonging share authorships to any papers so as to augment their paper count in their CVs. Bad, bad practice indeed, especially when they happen to admit candidly during an interview "Oh, no, I didn't really know anything about that work, I was in the group so I got my name on it" - then why on earth did you insert it in your CV as relevant qualification, you dumb4$$?

I was shocked when a colleague recently said that after two years of work she had eight publications, plus countless posters and participations to meetings. needless to say, seven of those eight were of the aforementioned kind. And who on earth would care about which meetings and school you attended, unless you presented one at the first or were prized as best-in-class at the latters?

I try to put only first-author papers on my CV. which also implies it is desperately short. But at least I know I can defend that work with my claws, whereas if somebody is mifdly interested in me can always look up the other papers on pubmed or elsewhere and discover which fields I also happened to brush on. I probably know more than the average person in those, but don't claim nor brag to being an expert about them.

Why am I doing this post, you may ask? Oh, because Nature just came out with a similar theme this weekend. With a wider view than mine, in fact, covering the responsibilities of co-authors on the scientific accuracy of the papers, real-world cases and so on. Go and read it, it's certainly better than my rants anyway.

Hello Kitty, kiss your 4$$ Goodbye

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

I am a genius.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Italians are quite honest, after all

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

Finally, house prices start to fall...

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

Dog eats mobile phone

It happened to a friend of mine.

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

Evolution

Here is my new Xmas present:


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

Rwanda!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ciao ciao.

Luca

DMC-FZ18 Reviews, finally!!!

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



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

Yesterday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(hum to "I believe in yesterday")

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

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

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

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

Who would have thought so?

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

House prices from the satellites

Wow, this is very Web 2.0.


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