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[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.

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)

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]

A couple of quotes taken from a nice article by Philip Greenspun which does not deal with diets:

Diet #1

In the 1980s Steve Ward, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, described a sure-fire dieting scheme. “All that you need for my diet is graph paper, a ruler, and a pencil,” Steve would explain. “The horizontal axis is time, one line per day. The vertical axis is weight in lbs. You plot your current weight on the left side of the paper. You plot your desired weight on a desired date towards the right side, making sure that you’ve left the correct number of lines in between (one per day). You draw a line from the current weight/date to the desired weight/date. Every morning you weigh yourself and plot the result. If the point is below the line, you eat whatever you want all day. If the point is above the line, you eat nothing but broccoli or some other low-calorie food.”

[Read More]

This piece which appeared on the New York Times a few weeks ago got me hooked: “They had it made”, by David Brooks. This is just one click away from the full essay published on the online June issue of The Atlantic, “What makes us happy”, by Joshua W. Shenk.

Go back in time and there’s another article on the Grant Study which appeared in the 1990: “Men at 65: New Findings On Well-Being”.

Sunday evening: I buy myself a return ticket to Finale Ligure.

Monday morning: I wake up at 5:30, pack kneepads gloves helmet and take the early morning train to the place where summer never ends.

To be honest, today finale was a bit cold but I still ended up in (baggy) shorts.

The idea was to do maybe a couple of runs on the “DH Donne” (a beatiful trail that hangs over Varigotti) but at the end I did 75% of the Enduro race course.

I’m in charge of a very important research project here at Acme Ltd., a major player in the oil business. With the latest state-of-the-art equipment I study the effects of hydrocarbons on seismic data; one way to do that is to model a porous medium filled with fluid which is like a rock filled with oil or shit.

There is a set of equations studied by two guys (Batzle and Wang) that are widely used in the industry to compute the elastic properties of a reservoir fluid starting from environmental parameters such as pressure and temperature.

An interesting piece was published a few days ago on the official google blog: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/future-of-search.html

Let me quote two passages:

It would be much nicer if we had a device with great connectivity that could do searches without interruption. One far-fetched idea: how about a wearable device that does searches in the background based on the words it picks up from conversations, and then flashes relevant facts?

So what’s our straightforward definition of the ideal search engine? Your best friend with instant access to all the world’s facts and a photographic memory of everything you’ve seen and know.

[Read More]

Altro video onboard girato sul San Genesio. Rispetto a quell’altro di cui ho già parlato, questo è venuto fuori un po’ peggio. Le riprese sono traballanti purtroppo (colpa del poco nastro americano che ho usato per fissare la bullet camera al casco), c’è poca continuità d’azione (colpa ovviamente mia; non sono un improvvisatore, e quando mi trovo su un percorso difficile ho bisogno di studiarlo per bene prima di farlo tutto in sella).

This is a helmet-cam video that I’ve recorded a few weeks ago on a trail which is known among locals to be one of the most fun and technical; it’s also known as the ‘classic’ or ‘1-3-2’ (because it links up sections of established – and numbered – hiking trails).

I have also the full ride, with no music:

…and here’s the backstage: