“I am known for the legendary length of my blog posts and e-mails. This stems from the engineer’s mindset of exploring every possible nook and cranny of an argument to make sure one has not overlooked anything.”

– http://blog.tabini.ca/2011/04/writing-less-to-write-more/

“Bari nel nostro cuore” (Taken with instagram)

Had a great day of riding last Saturday. Woke up at 6:30am, took the 7:39 train to Sestri Levante. Three hours or so, and then here I am in Sestri; cool breeze, warm sunshine, I started following the Superenduro signs. Here’s a few pics that sum up the day.

And PS1, 2 and 3 were gone in a second; too much fun to stop.

Randall is one of my favourite authors. This comic here sums up perfectly my current feelings about tech bloggers (also read this rant that I wrote some time ago).

How the story went first of all: the Japan Syndrome, appeared on The Economist on March 15th.

Japan Does Not Face Another Chernobyl by William Tucker.

Radiation dose chart by Randall Munroe, inspired by this page written by his friend Ellen.

About Godzilla then, this is a must read: Japan’s Long Nuclear Disaster Film by Peter W. Kirby.

And if you’re thinking about clean energy, look at this.

From “Secrets of a Mind-Gamer”, a fascinating article on a normal guy who becomes a memory champion:

In his 1869 book Hereditary Genius Sir Francis Galton argued that a person could improve at mental and physical activities until he hit a wall, which “he cannot by any education or exertion overpass.” In other words, the best we can do is simply the best we can do. But Ericsson and his colleagues have found over and over again that with the right kind of effort, that’s rarely the case. They believe that Galton’s wall often has much less to do with our innate limits than with what we consider an acceptable level of performance. They’ve found that top achievers typically follow the same general pattern. They develop strategies for keeping out of the autonomous stage by doing three things: focusing on their technique, staying goal-oriented and getting immediate feedback on their performance […] To improve, we have to be constantly pushing ourselves beyond where we think our limits lie and then pay attention to how and why we fail.

[Read More]

I would like to move to some place neat in the future, maybe a place where the outdoors are close and people are friendly and the quality of life is great (maybe everybody dreams about a place like this).

Vancouver seems to be that place, however it would be difficult to find a job there unless I change profession and become something else than a earth scientist.

So a collegue of mine told me about Calgary. The Rocky Mountains are close, only the weather is not temperate like in Vancouver but no problem about the jobs – plenty of opportunities to work in the oil industry.

Making a really good coffee

Interesting post on Scientific American, however this barista needs a reality check: a refractometer to make coffee ? I’d recommend a couple of place in my hometown (Bari) where baristas have no PhD but make the best coffee ever.

Dopo aver visto di persona come va Andrea Bruno sulla sua Covert, e poi un’altro video che mostra quel matto di Brendan Fairclough sulla nuova Enduro S-Works – attenzione all’ultimo minuto del video, quando Brendan fa davvero una cosa esagerata!, davvero mi viene da chiedere se questa nuova razza di bici da enduro non siano il massimo che un biker possa desiderare.

Capaci di fare cose impensate in discesa, pedalabili in salita, fino a che non si parla di utilizzo in tracciati puramente DH, chi ha bisogno di un’altro mezzo ?

A great article on Slate.com: taking inspiration from “King’s speech”, a stutterer writes about stuttering.

Some great insights, worth reading if you are vaguely interested in the subject (or if you have a friend who stammers and want to know what on earth does he think when he’s stuck on a word).

I love tech bloggers such as Gruber, Brooks, Arment. Even if there really is nothing in common between me and those guys except for a generic interest in technology and nerdism, I still love their passion, the public interactions on twitter and instagram (true, sometimes their shots are not really worth much praise, but praised they are), and in some cases (e.g., Gruber) their writing craft.

But today I was reading a blog post by one of these guys and asked incredously myself: “how does somebody that has a passion for writing, and who’s a native english speaker, make these errors ?”.

What I was looking for: an app to store my passwords

I stuck with Lockbox Lite for a long time on my iPhone. Then I got fed up about not being able to have the same data available also on my two Macs (not to mention the stupid ads). So I started looking for something that had these features:

• quick 4-digits general password to access all the rest
• sync between iPhone and mac

About the first point, I know that it’s a weak point and raises the question “why using AES 256-bit encryption if you rely on a 4-digit number to secure all your confidential data”. Well, I’m not overly paranoid about this stuff – and then the alternative is to keep my passwords in a text file somewhere on my computer.

Fine settimana sulla neve riassunto in tre foto.

“In 2007, when he was at the State Department, Jared Cohen wrote with tragic wrongheadedness that “the Internet is a place where Iranian youth can … say anything they want as they operate free from the grips of the police-state apparatus.” Thanks to the exciting new technology, many of those freely texting Iranian youths are in prison or dead. Cohen himself now works for Google as the director of “Google Ideas.”

Povero illuso che ti fai una gita sui Corni di Canzo alla domenica. Se sei l’unico che va su con una bici da montagna, ci sara’ un motivo. Arrivi in cima, e scopri che e’ tutto un ghiaccio. Per perdere duecento metri di dislivello su un sentiero che zigzaga dolcemente tra i boschi ci metti un’eternita’. Scivoli e fai di culo per terra gran parte della discesa, cercando di trattenere la bici che cerca di scapparsene via. Meno male che non c’e’ nessuno a vedere questa scena fantozziana. E meno male che poi alla fine il ghiaccio scompare, e ti trovi il sentiero che ti aspettavi; un piccolo capolavoro su terreno asciutto, tecnico a tratti e scorrevole quanto basta.