Category Archives: Opinion

Mountain Lion: freedom is no longer cool.

This is a rant. Here is a 10 years long Apple customer, generally satisfied with the quality of the product, but my stance started to change recently, and radically. Apple is pushing it too far. As I smelled long ago with the introduction of the App marketplace, their plan apparently is to make OSX like [...]

Computational chemistry development in research

Imagine you are a professor in organic chemistry. You received financial support for a project, and you are ready to hire a Ph.D. student to make it happen. The project requires the synthesis of a new compound. Imagine you interview your best candidate. At the whiteboard, you present him with various problems of how to [...]

“Google plus” and “What do you love”

Since its release, I got access to Google+ and started playing with it, so I feel obliged to join the crowd and state something about it. I want to first state one important point. I am not a fan of social networks, at all, unless when useful (such as LinkedIn). Why? For four reasons, all [...]

The end of the space age

Today, an era ends. Today the last Shuttle, Atlantis, is scheduled to land for the last time , closing the era of the Shuttle missions, and basically the Space age. Why I say so? Well I don’t think I should spend low-grade effort explaining something that has already been professionally written at the Economist. Instead, [...]

The Disposable Scientist

I happened to read this very interesting article from The Economist with title “The disposable academic – Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time“. The article details in accurate terms the current condition of post-MasterDegree formation and professional development in the field of academic research. I invite you to read it, and [...]

An initiative to promote science through a symbol: tulips

After I came back from TAM 2010, I was waiting for my train to bring me home. I started thinking that there is a potential Public Relations issue with scientific proponents and skeptics around, and it’s never good to have a Public Relations issue. I feel there’s a need to change this, and a need [...]

TAMLondon 2010 remarks and comments – Part 4 of n

Notable talks Susan Blackmore presented an excerpt of her first years of  research on paranormal. She shows intriguing statistics on paranormal evaluation, describes some techniques used for cold reading. A consistent part of her talk was relative to physiological explanations of different phenomena our minds perceive as paranormal or mystic. More specifically, she touches arguments [...]

TAMLondon 2010 remarks and comments – Part 3 of n

This post continues my review on TAMLondon 2010. I will go into details of the audience and the talks, and memorable quotes. I keep the individual talks for the last post, due tomorrow. The audience: with an audience reaching one thousand delegates (more than twice the first edition), question time was in some cases limited, [...]

TAMLondon 2010 remarks and comments – Part 2 of n

TAM London 2010 was highly different from the first European edition in 2009. If I had to describe the 2009 edition in just three words, these would be: showmen/women, music, science. For this year edition, the three words would be very different: interviews, feelings, activism. First, interviews. For the sake of argument, I will consider [...]

TAMLondon 2010 remarks and comments – Part 1 of n

I just arrived home from The Amazing Meeting 2010, and I would really like to report my warm comments on the event, but for practical reasons I am forced to delay a clearly articulate post. Those who followed @forthescience on twitter already had an idea of the event, although reporting with clarity a live situation [...]