Category: English

Dear Europe

May 13, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Please don’t do it.

Please, let’s not go back 30 years. The freedom to circulate in Europe as an European citizen is one of the most important freedom that has made our life easy.

Moving around, using the Identity Card, or the Passport, without having the necessity to apply for a visa or anything like that makes not only everything super easy and nice, but also gives a feel to be all the same, within the diversity. Together with the Euro and the flag these are the only tangible signs of an integration which has gone far, but has not yet complete..

We have to go to a more integrated system, where all Europe should be felt as our home. With the diversity of culture, language and maybe attitude, but still one big jam of people who leverage the strengths of each other and try to solve the weakness. The European Community, not only a political body, but a community of different people.

I understand this terrible wave of extreme right, with its xenophobic and racist ideas, is taking its toll on the possible decisions. But I think the other parties should make a stand. They should fight back this narrow-mind vision.

European Flag

Europe has been born by the vision of people who are now long-dead (Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, Paul Henri Spaak, and Alcide De Gasperi), and who built this ensemble as a way to achieve peace and better conditions for everybody.

Europe should be at the forefront of integration, leading with a peaceful and calm approach, as an old continent should do. We’ve got tons of history and we did a disaster in the last century.

Let’s take another seat on this one.

Let’s make this one worth remembering as the century in which Europe took the lead in making the world a better place, starting within its own frontiers.

Let’s not think in three weeks span. Let’s think in 30-40 years time or even more. Let’s go ahead and make the European Community more connected and let it thrive.

In varietate concordia, United in diversity, Uniti nella diversitá, (Motto of the European Union), this is what Europe is.

This is why, this a great Community. And please, leave the door open, ’cause no Community is an Island. Let’s think BIG.

Unity and accents

May 1, 2011 / / 1 Comment

With the release of Unity and the (following) upgrade, I found myself with a problem that I thought to have solved long time ago: how to write accents. It turns out that the use of the compose key (Super/Meta … the one with the Windows logo) is used for the default shortcuts, which you need badly, to have a decent experience with unity..

The good thing is that I’ve discovered the layout UK – with WinKey which provides all the most classic accent like á é ó which can actually do the trick.

On another note I think Unity is pretty a good idea… But I have to use it a bit more to tell the true story..

Update: Actually I found out that on the UK -with WinKey the standard è is of the less used type (there are two: e acute (é) and e grave (è).

Now the last one is very important because is the third (singular) person of the verb to be (Today is a good day, Oggi è una bella giornata), therefore is used a lot.
I found a decent compromise using a US Layout with Italian letters:
Screenshot-Keyboard Layout "Italy US keyboard with Italian letters"

You get the accent with Alt-Gr.

HIH

Endangered species Symposium

April 20, 2011 / / 0 Comments

At the EBI there is an annual symposium which is organized by the Science and Society committee which I’ve been involved in the past years (some video are available on the youtube channel), but not this one. But no fear!

New people get on with the job and pull out a really nice symposium.

If you in Cambridge, you've got to come

This year the committee has chosen the topic of Biodiversity and Endangered Species, the 6th of May at Fitwilliam College Auditorium, Cambridge, Uk.

It’s free for all, so if you’re around don’t forget to come over 🙂

Yeah, there is even a Facebook event, if you are into that thing 🙂

Cesium contamination projections

April 18, 2011 / / 2 Comments

As you know there was a massive Earthquake (and there are still some going on) in Japan followed up by a massive nuclear accident at Fukushima I which has been evaluated 7 on the INES scale grade accident.

Now there are some prediction made by the University of Cologne about how the Cesium will spread around the world.

In the case it does rain

Cesium spreading Wet scenario

and it doesn’t look good.

And in the case it doesn’t rain

Cesium spreading Dry scenario

And it doesn’t look good at all.

Via Crisis

Opensource philosophy to science?

April 17, 2011 / / 3 Comments

Lately there has been a clear movement to move science towards a more open way to make research.

I’m not talking about Open Acess Publishing, which is still important, but to the real art and sweat to do science.

Science has always been very collaborative, however the dimension of this collaborative effort has always been restricted to a small group. This is not the case when general problems seems to be tackle.

For example, when the problem is the definition of a standard, like NeuroML or SBML, the development of it is a community driven project, where the community works as a whole to achieve a standard which is backed by the biggest number of people interested, so can be easily adopted.

The beneficial impact of standard is not the topic of this post, and for the sake of brevity I just want to point out that a well-coded model in a well-recognised standard gives the possibility to share the work of a modeller (in this instance) and make the model be re-used by other people.

On the same line OpenWetWare wanted to share the protocols used in the lab as soon they were established, and actually even before that as ‘Work in progress’.

The ability of a scientist to be a part of a community is not taken in account at all, due to the Publish or Perish system which is right now up and running. This model does not encourage collaboration, and actually create groups of people which are competing on the same topic to scoop each other. This is a broken system.

It’s so broken that some people even decide to leave academia, and that is only one of the cases. A lot of letters are also available in Nature and this article from the Economist got quite famous as well.

Therefore I watched with a lot of interest the new way proposed by Dall’Olio  which consist in collaborative editing of papers.

So far, if I didn’t miss any, at least two papers with this approach have been written, which is very interesting and shed a bright light for the future.

Still the number of places available in academia and the way the recruitment is organized uses the current model, which does not fit the market, and it’s prone to discard talented people very easily. There should be at least a live debate on how to fix this problem, and move science to a super collaborative discipline.

Happier scientists and better science sounds good to me.

Permaculture links

April 14, 2011 / / 0 Comments

It’s been awhile that I’m looking at Permaculture design and all the things connected with it.

Quickly two very valuable links about Permaculture:

Especially the latest link has a clear scheme of the garden.

It’s awesome

scheme from deepgreen

Scheme for the backyard permaculture food forset from deepgreen

Rendering of the food forest

Rendering of the food forest garden from deepgreen

On the other side I’m getting my hands dirty building a system to make local food easier to find/trade/swap with a bunch of friends. We are using django as web development framework and have some serious intention about it.

If you are a django ninja and want to be involved (or just want to be involved) just send me an e-mail to mattions. Attach the gmail.com after it. Please use a sensible subject, so I know why you are writing to me (or link to this post.)

 

Quizzzz

March 22, 2011 / / 1 Comment

What do you think an airbus belonging to the Canadian airforce in the sky between Sicily and Lybia, called petro01 is doing?

Note the trajectory.
Have a look in real time.

Update: @FMCNL on twitter is broadcasting all the info in clear he can pick with the radio.

Why renewable could do the job

March 21, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Sometimes there is this liet motive which says “Renewables can not cope with the world Energy demand, therefore the use of nuke or oil is mandatory”

It’s false. Read here.

This does not taking in account the geothermal power and the high altitude power (under research, but looking promising).

Then of course there is the problem of finite resources, demography and overpopulation which will not fade away…. but this is another story.