I discovered this Withings wi-fi body scale after reading this tweet by Neven Mrgan:
My weight report for 2010: http://j.mp/eypTcB Executive summary: could be better, could be worse.
It sounds like a great tool to track your body weight: compare it to what I’ve done last year.
However, I doubt I’ll ever buy it. Too much technology around you really damages your health much more than a cappuccino and cornetto.
Somehow (twitter maybe ?) I’ve found the transcript of an interview to Bob Dylan which appeared on Playboy in 1966.
So1, I don’t know if Bob Dylan was totally out of his mind or if he was just playing crazy, but this 1966 interview is brilliant stuff.
For example, the interviewer asks if he’s selling out:
What can I say? I’d like to see one of these so-called fans. I’d like to have him blindfolded and brought to me. It’s like going out to the desert and screaming and then having little kids throw their sandbox at you. I’m only 24.
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I have sketched a series of yoga poses that I follow as a daily exercise.
I thought they might be of interest to someone else as well, so I’ve put them on this Flickr set.
Feel free to grab them, print them out but remember that they have been hand-draw1 on a few evenings between August and September 2010, so be nice to them and send me an email if you need them for other purposes apart from your personal use.
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[Farewell, Facebook](http://www.flickr.com/photos/aadm/4855655751/#/photos/aad m/4855655751/lightbox/) (by aadm)
I got very bored with all this facebook craze lately so here’s what I did last June.
There’s a place in Italy where you can still eat for 5 euros.
“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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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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.”
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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”.
[Read More]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.
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I have recently subscribed to Alpinist, a truly wonderful magazine; there was this very funny cartoon here that I just had to share with my climbing friends. So I took my D70s, grabbed a picture and here it is: version 10.0 Climbing Partner.
By the way, I wonder why there is no such thing here in Italy as Alpinist or Dirt Rag ?
Yesterday I was browsing Merlin Mann’s 43folders , and I’ve stumbled upon his definition of geek:
I think Getting Things Done appeals to geeks for a lot of reasons. Overgeneralizing for effect:
- geeks are often disorganized or have a twisted skein of attention-deficit issues
Well, GTD does not appeal to me (even though I have already written a short note about it), but all of the above points…. man, that’s me !
[Read More]This is the way:
get an idea: basically, whatever springs to my mind;
write it down: on a piece of paper, if on the move; if connected, open my gmail account, write a new mail with subject something like “[blog] how to spit like a lama”, then save as draft;
leave it standing for at least a couple of hours;
copy & paste it on the blogger edit page, do some minor cosmetic modifications, change the publishing dates to avoid embarassment (“yes boss I’ve been working for hours on this project, what do you think I’m sitting up on my ass in this office?”)
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