I am observing with great interest the development at Area51 for new Question/Answers sites to be opened with the StackExchange system. One thing that makes me cringe a bit is the very strong fragmentation. I think this stems either from the need of personal protagonism of each person (nothing bad with it, progress happens also [...]
The kind folks behind StackOverflow, a free Question/Answers website for programming questions, recently decided to open new Q/A websites for many additional interesting topics, from wine tasting and cooking to mathematics. The fundamental requisite for such new sites to be opened is a rather strict community review and development of a critical mass of contributors [...]
This is something interesting. What about a prize for unscientific claims: “the Unscientist award”? At the moment, only Patrick Lockerby (the author of the post linked above) proposes such prize according to the following rules: the potential candidate must either make use of an already debunked argument, a logical fallacy, or (verbatim) “self-aggrandising puerile prosey [...]
January 21, 2010 – 4:15 am
After the recent tragic events in Haiti, it is a priority to help doctors without borders as much as possible. Please donate, even a small amount from a lot of people can make a sizable difference.
January 14, 2010 – 1:02 pm
I love xkcd. A comic combining fun and math by definition has to be good and geeky and the author, Randall Munroe, is a real genius on this. The latest comic is pretty interesting
The image is self-descriptive, meaning that each graph represents information about the image itself. For example, the first panel contains a pie [...]
January 10, 2010 – 4:56 pm
I found this very interesting site about the periodic table of elements, from the University of Nottingham. For each element, there’s a video showing the characteristics of the element, and a brief commentary. Worth checking out if you always had some curiosity about the chemical elements, what they look like, and how they behave.
They also [...]
November 19, 2009 – 2:16 pm
Wikimedia fundation is organizing another round of fundraising to support Wikipedia. I wish to remember that the English version currently contains more than 3 millions pages.
Wikipedia is one of the most impressive and revolutionary achievement of the internet crowd. It changed the way culture is made available. Wikipedia is important for all of us. So [...]
December 10, 2008 – 1:37 pm
I added Twitter to the blog. It’s a nice toy, and I want to see if it’s actually useful. For brief reports on my status, it seems like a nice thing, and I am having fun using the cellphone to update it.
August 27, 2008 – 7:56 pm
I am proud to announce that Springer has finally released on the web (and Amazon as well) the descriptive information of the textbook I took part on: Computing for Comparative Microbial Genomics. It was a fantastic and incredible experience, for which I will always be grateful to Dave Ussery, my supervisor at Technical University of [...]
