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 [...]
Yesterday around 14.30 a big quake hit the Sendai area in Japan, followed by a tsunami and a contiguous stream of additional shocks. I immediately contacted friends in Tokyo and they are all fine. Transportation in Tokyo is interrupted, and so is communication. I don’t know any more details. I just have news from a [...]
Some time ago, I proposed the foundation of a Question and Answer site for Academia. Now, the Academia StackExchange has reached commitment phase, meaning that the proposal aggregated a consistent number of people who may have an interest in it, and further aggregation of active participant is sought after. You may report your interest in [...]
February 25, 2011 – 12:45 am
Nothing says relax better than a peaceful evening in front of a steamy cup of chamomile. Since thousands of years, humanity uses it as a natural remedy for a large amount of ailments, most notably hypertension, sleeplessness and to ease a flu-dominated night, like in my case recently. Moved by curiosity, I took some time [...]
February 22, 2011 – 12:55 am
I recently bought this 240 Gigabytes of awesomeness, conveniently packed into a 2.5″ SATA box. It’s an Other World Computing Mercury Extreme Solid State Hard Drive. It has no moving parts, it consumes less battery, and it’s fast. Damn fast. This thing is so fast it opens applications before you lift your finger from the [...]
February 7, 2011 – 3:03 pm
As you probably recall, some time ago I proposed to associate scientific dissemination and research to a symbol. I chose this symbol to be the tulip, and I planted some bulbs. As winter will turn into spring soon, they start peeking out of the cold soil Satisfying! This year, I decided to donate my royalties [...]