I am an enthusiast mountain bike rider, but because I seem to be affected by a number of injuries associated with slow recovery times (my old age plays a big part here, as it is physiologically proven that is faster to recover from a broken bone when you’re 20 than if you’re approaching your 40s), I don’t get as much time riding my bike as I’d like to.

So that’s why I enjoy mountain bike movies; and I’m pretty sure that I’m not alone here, and plenty of other people like watching this sort of things because, apart from professionals, nobody really rides as much as they like.

Day 303/366 - Dead on her feet (by Great Beyond)

Oggi parlavo con amici delle campagne pubblicitarie per la sicurezza stradale, mettendo a confronto quelle italiane (personaggi dello spettacolo e dello sport che si ficcano in auto dicendo “oh andate piano pero’ eh”) e quelle inglesi (video crudo di ragazzina sbattuta all’aria da un’auto).

Poi trovo sul blog di ciclistica.it questa foto. Anche io vado in bici sempre e dovunque, e questa cartolina mi ha toccato.

[iPad and crufty interfaces](http://web.archive.org/web/20051107101903/http:// mpt.phrasewise.com/stories/storyReader$374)

Why the iPad is a potentially groundbreaking platform, despite the accusations of being ‘only a large iPhone’.

Just read this old piece written in 2003 by a (very smart) tech blogger; it’s about user interface defects as heritage of early computer hardware limitations, such as the presence of save and quit commands.

Step back to 2010, and guess what is the only computing platform that does not have any save and quit commands ? Correct, it’s the iPad.

Beatiful photos here: http://nsmb.com/3326-dorado-tested/.

They convey an intense idea of action with those blurred backgrounds and the rider not quite in focus above the panned trails; I also like the tight shots and the washed-out colour palette.

And speaking about the ’look’ of these images, I couldn’t help but noticing what the rider was wearing: mean-looking full-face helmet and menacing dark goggles, a simple t-shirt, shorts and the diminuitive 661 knee-pads. And I remember similar photos of a british competitor to the Mega-avalanche (Dirt #79, September 2008): old shirt, shorts and a pair of mud-encrusted skate shoes.

Avevo da tempo in casa una versione di Alice in Wonderland annotata da Martin Gardner, famoso editor della colonna di giochi matematici di Scientific American.

Sono al capitolo VI (“Pig and Pepper”), dove Alice chiede al Cheshire Cat:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to”, said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where –” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go”, said the Cat

[Read More]

There’s a place in Italy where you can still eat for 5 euros.

Training with my fixie at the Idroscalo. In the foreground, my red San Marco Concor; back there, the mountains that you rarely see from this very polluted and hazy city – the Grigne. Training was: 15 series of friggin’ fast spins (around 100 rpm), 15" each, followed by 45" of slower pedaling. Well the idea was this but since I had no speedometer, nothing to measure the number of pedaling strokes per minute, and just one fuckin gear, I did what I could. I hope it’s effective (my legs were certainly feeling it).

“This report relates the results of an advanced, quantitative seismic characterization of the Alpha field, through simultaneous elastic inversion, rock physics modelling and stochastic classification. In the absence of any reliable geophysical data, the opinions and interpretations presented in this report were invented. However, due to the uncertainty inherent in the estimation of all sub-surface parameters, they might as well turn out to be correct, almost correct, slightly wrong or totally fucked up. We cannot and do not guarantee the accuracy of any interpretation carried out by our officers, agents or employees. We shall not, except in case of success, be responsible for any loss, cost or damage incurred.”

Customer says, “Waiter, taste this soup.”

Waiter: “Is it cold?”

Customer: “Just taste the soup.”

Waiter: “Didn’t you order the chicken noodle?”

Customer: “Taste . . . the soup!”

Waiter: “O.K., already. Where’s the spoon?”

Customer: “Aha!”

(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/magazine/30FOB-onlanguage-t.html)

Il 29 agosto 2009 il New York Times pubblica un articolo di Amy Cortese, “Wiggling Their Toes at the Shoe Giants”.

Il 31 agosto sul sito della Repubblica trovo un pezzo di Federico Rampini, “Le scarpe con le dita hanno conquistato l’America”.

Lo leggo.

Sensazione di déjà vu.

Lo rileggo, e lo confronto con l’articolo del New York Times.

###Articoli a confronto

Vibram con la linea Five Fingers […] ha visto le sue vendite triplicare ogni anno, dopo il lancio nel 2006.

##day 1 - mercoledì 22 luglio

Il gruppo è formato da me, Luca, Roberto (detto “il Presidente”) e Stefano. Luca e Roberto fanno 102 anni messi assieme; e come ama ripetere Luca, il merito è tutto del Presidente. Stefano, tranquillo, rilassato e simpaticissimo, viene da Pisa, ed è quello che ha l’ultima parola in fatto di meccanica.

Partiamo da Milano noi quattro più otto moto; Luca infatti è un famoso dispensatore di motorette, e assieme alla sua fedelissima (una Bimota DB4 con motore desmodue 1100cc) si porta appresso una Aprilia RS125 e tre o quattro Cagiva Mito che distribuirà in giro per il paddock.

Una bella sorpresa che mi è arrivata a casa il mese scorso. Meno male, torniamo a sognare.

This is the article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/business/energy-environment/24geotherm.html

And this is one very nice and informed comment from a PhD student that puts things into the right perspective:

1. The major difference between enhanced geothermal and standard oil and gas extraction is the high pressures used to create geothermal reservoirs. Oil and gas are normally extracted from porous sedimentary rocks (10-30% void space), but the heat fluxes required for geothermal are found in volcanic rocks with less than 1% void space. The rock must be fractured to allow water to flow through it, and it is this process that causes earthquakes. The earthquakes can continue for months after the pressure has been released because the Earth is a dynamic place and not all of the stress transfer is instantaneous; in fact, the later-occurring quakes are usually governed by stress changes caused by diffusion (slow filtering through the limited porosity due to pressure gradients) rather than advection (the injection velocity/pressure, which causes the immediate earthquakes.

2. There is no danger of creating “new tectonic plates”; the tectonic plates are on a completely different scale than a single geothermal reservoir (1000s vs 1s of kilometers). The absolute worst case scenario would be changing the stress regime enough to reactivate an existing tectonic-scale fault like the San Andreas/San Jacinto etc., which is very unlikely due to the scale difference.

3. For risk assessment purposes, risk is the product of hazard (the event that might be triggered) and vulnerability. A project like this ends up going forward because when the hazard is large (i.e. it is very likely that you will trigger small earthquakes), the vulnerability is also low since it will only affect a relatively sparsely populated area immediately nearby. Obviously, if you happen to live in that area, that is not a reassuring argument. In the other extreme case, if the vulnerability is high (eg. a Landers earthquake-type rupture across most of SoCal), the hazard is low (the chance of re-activating the San Andreas is slim). In both cases, the product of the two works out to a small number, so the risk is deemed acceptable. The soft underbelly of risk assessment is that seismic hazard is fiendishly difficult to quantify given present methodology and observational capabilities.

4. Regional seismic hazard and geothermal energy will continue to be coupled since the areas with the highest geothermal gradients (rate of temperature increase with depth) tend to be tectonically active (young or recently deformed) crust. However, the potential benefits to figuring out geothermal energy are myriad - clean, reliable, domestic supplies - and I think it’s worth pursuing. An exciting tangential scientific opportunity also exists: if we can figure out the processes that control microseismicity in reservoirs, we will be much closer to predicting and someday mitigating the types of earthquakes that make headlines on a more regular basis.

5. This may come as a surprise, but the largest geothermal producer in the world is the oil giant Chevron; they have several enormous traditional geothermal projects in Indonesia.

[click here for the original comment]

Echidna e ornitorinco sono dei mammiferi ovipari appartenenti all’ordine Monotremata. Ecco dei brani tratti dall’articolo del New York Times che mi ha catturato:

The long-beaked echidna is a genuine living link between reptiles and birds on one branch, and more familiar placental mammals like ourselves on the next.

Another avianlike feature is the cloaca, the single orifice through which an echidna or platypus voids waste, has sex and lays eggs, and by which the group gets its name. Yet through that uni-perforation, a male echnida can extrude a four-headed penis.

[Read More]

Vero manifesto elettorale trovato a Bari.