Suppose someone gives you the chemical formula of a substance, such as and asks you the color this substance is expected to have. Is it possible to give an answer? In most cases, you may have an educated guess, but an accurate prediction is far from trivial: the color of a substance is decided at [...]
This article continues my series of three articles on how to defend yourself from bad scientific communication perpetrated by non-scientific newspapers. The first post detailed the scientific article and the mechanism of citations. In this post I will proceed detailing the peer reviewing process, and two numbers, the Impact Factor and the h-Index, to obtain [...]
Check out this great movie on the BBC website: a young amputee decided to replace his non-functional hand with a robotic one. The new hand allows him to perform tasks as tying a shoe, opening a bottle, and fully rotate around the wrist, something not possible for a human hand. This is impressive on so [...]
Vim is a great, great programming tool. Even after years of experience with it you still get to discover, either by change or by sharing, fantastic tips to make an impossible task incredibly easy. It is the case with my recent problem of exporting the visual aspect of vim (as from terminal) to an HTML [...]
I am really sad to report my utter (but expected) failure with green stuff: the tulips died. From really green sprouts they suddenly became yellow and died within a week. This is the cold body aftermath I have no idea of what went wrong, but I will try again next year. What hasn’t failed however, [...]
April 30, 2011 – 12:00 pm
I see a lot of news announcements with new and extraordinary claims about scientific discoveries, mainly from daily newspapers or websites shown by news feeds. I think it’s time for me to present my point of view about how damaging this process is to correct scientific perception to the public. In addition, I will try [...]
Rule changed: made safe and easy refrigeration possible. Raised environmental awareness. Chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) is a class of compounds, the simplest among them with a structure similar to the one of methane: a tetrahedron. A simple representative is the one pictured below, Dichlorodifluoromethane. It’s a molecule made of one carbon atom (in the center, black), two [...]
Occasionally, I get to find very interesting scientific apps for the Mac. In light of the recent events, SeisMac is definitely one of those. While not technically useful for the general public, it is a very important application for research. All Mac laptops include the so-called Sudden Motion Sensor, a Micromechanical system (MEMS) accelerometer. This [...]
I just saw this very interesting and shocking movie reporting the quakes rattling Japan from 9th to 14th of March. The amount of events after the big one, at 1:17, is devastating. I wanted to see more, adding the third dimension. I tinkered with wget, bash, gnuplot and ffmpeg to produce this less visually appealing [...]
March 16, 2011 – 12:22 am
This post is for my Italian readers. There’s no English version because the issue does not exist in English, only in Italian. It is relative to the misunderstanding between the terms “meltdown” and “fusion”, in Italian both translated as “fusione”. I proceed saying that what unfortunately happened in Japan is a reactor core meltdown, not [...]