And again on Belgium splitting…

The NY Times this time.

Gingerbread Haka!!!

a movie in tune with the rugby world cup

grazie a mio fratellino paolo.

Neglected Diseases

The new Nature is out. I’ve stolen the time to my paper-writing to read the brief news, if not the real papers, but really can’t discuss them right now. Too damn busy…

Draft is due tomorrow and I am still adding data to the discussion and introductory session!!! Bad bad practice.

Anyway, nature you have to pay for, but you can get the Neglected Disease report for free. So, go and check it out.

I fully agree

cut and paste from:

Belgium:Time to call it a day

Sep 6th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Sometimes it is right for a country to recognise that its job is done

Illustration by Claudio Munoz

A RECENT glance at the Low Countries revealed that, nearly three months after its latest general election, Belgium was still without a new government. It may have acquired one by now. But, if so, will anyone notice? And, if not, will anyone mind? Even the Belgians appear indifferent. And what they think of the government they may well think of the country. If Belgium did not already exist, would anyone nowadays take the trouble to invent it?

Such questions could be asked of many countries. Belgium’s problem, if such it is, is that they are being asked by the inhabitants themselves. True, in opinion polls most Belgians say they want to keep the show on the road. But when they vote, as they did on June 10th, they do so along linguistic lines, the French-speaking Walloons in the south for French-speaking parties, the Dutch-speaking Flemings in the north for Dutch-speaking parties. The two groups do not get on—hence the inability to form a government. They lead parallel lives, largely in ignorance of each other. They do, however, think they know themselves: when a French-language television programme was interrupted last December with a spoof news flash announcing that the Flemish parliament had declared independence, the king had fled and Belgium had dissolved, it was widely believed.

No wonder. The prime minister designate thinks Belgians have nothing in common except “the king, the football team, some beers”, and he describes their country as an “accident of history”. In truth, it isn’t. When it was created in 1831, it served more than one purpose. It relieved its people of various discriminatory practices imposed on them by their Dutch rulers. And it suited Britain and France to have a new, neutral state rather than a source of instability that might, so soon after the Napoleonic wars, set off more turbulence in Europe.

The upshot was neither an unmitigated success nor an unmitigated failure. Belgium industrialised fast; grabbed a large part of Africa and ruled it particularly rapaciously; was itself invaded and occupied by Germany, not once but twice; and then cleverly secured the headquarters of what is now the European Union. Along the way it produced Magritte, Simenon, Tintin, the saxophone and a lot of chocolate. Also frites. No doubt more good things can come out of the swathe of territory once occupied by a tribe known to the Romans as the Belgae. For that, though, they do not need Belgium: they can emerge just as readily from two or three new mini-states, or perhaps from an enlarged France and Netherlands.

Brussels can devote itself to becoming the bureaucratic capital of Europe. It no longer enjoys the heady atmosphere of liberty that swirled outside its opera house in 1830, intoxicating the demonstrators whose protests set the Belgians on the road to independence. The air today is more fetid. With freedom now taken for granted, the old animosities are ill suppressed. Rancour is ever-present and the country has become a freak of nature, a state in which power is so devolved that government is an abhorred vacuum. In short, Belgium has served its purpose. A praline divorce is in order.

Belgians need not feel too sad. Countries come and go. And perhaps a way can be found to keep the king, if he is still wanted. Since he has never had a country—he has always just been king of the Belgians—he will not miss Belgium. Maybe he can rule a new-old country called Gaul. But king of the Gauloises doesn’t sound quite right, does it?

New Books

Carl Zimmer let us know that he’s just finished editing the concise edition of “The Descent of Man” by Charles Darwin. So, I went off to amazon to buy a copy together with “Fish with fingers, Whales with legs”, and… “Pearls Before Swine: Blts Taste So Darn Good”…

Here’s the proof:

Open Orders

Order Date: 8 Sep 2007 Order #: 202-4890542-7183528 Recipient: Luca A. Fenu

Items not yet dispatched: Delivery estimate: 28 Nov 2007 – 30 Nov 2007 1 of: The Descent of Man Sold by: Amazon EU S.a.r.L. 1 of: Pearls Before Swine: Blts Taste So Darn Good Sold by: Amazon EU S.a.r.L. 1 of: At the Water’s Edge: Fish with Fingers, Whales with Legs… Sold by: Amazon EU S.a.r.L.

The only prob is that I’ll have to wait to get the others too, since Amazon does make you pay for delivery (differently from Play.com, where I usually buy my stuff). So the stuff will not come through before end of November!!!

Beautiful Pictures

Produced with the ‘processing’ language, but most of all a keen artistic sense: http://complexification.net/

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Thanks to Zimmer’s latest post for the discovery.

…and the Big Cut&Paste

Turkish (self proclaimed) theoretical physicist accused of plagiarising papers.

According to Nature, the ArXiv removed their pubblications (70, 40 of which authored by one same guy – now that’s a lot even for theoreticists), after ascertaining that they contained large sections from previous papers. two of the PhD involved had a host of papers in gravitational physics, but couldn’t solve basic newtonian physics problems… Ugh!

The trouble began last November, when Salti and another graduate student, Oktay Aydogdu, underwent oral examinations for their PhDs. Although both had an extensive list of publications in gravitational physics, they struggled to answer even basic, high-school-level questions, according to Özgür Sariog brevelu, an associate professor at METU. “They didn’t know fundamental stuff like newtonian mechanics,” he says.

More worrying for me is that these people did actually publish their work on peer-reviewed journals, although Low Impact. Is this the kind of serious checks that publishers claim to offer when they oppose open publishing?

The Big Splash…

And the new Nature is out too, with a brief piece on how different sciences are homing in on the Dinosaurs’ Asteroid Catastrophe, tackling it from various fronts and cross-fertilising each other with insights and suggestions on where and when EXACTLY this did happen.

I believe these links are freely available to anyone. If not, they should.

Climate changes, it rains more, snails die…

The new issue of Nature Reports: Climate Change is out.

Kind of confusing, in fact, to read in the same page of a species of snail going extinct because seasonal rains on the only atoll it leaves in are diminishing, while the next piece talks about increased rain due to Global Warming. Nothing strange, really, it only goes to show a point many scientist have made before: More energy in the atmosphere does not mean just hotter the year round, it means a more energetic atmosphere, therefore more storms, more rains, more extremes…

Like water in a bucket, which when still is flat, and when spun along the axis climb the walls following a parabolic shape, therefore higher on the walls and lower than still at the bottom.

So, may be the arid regions will become more arid, while the arctic regions will get even colder? I don’t know. IANACS (I Am Not A Climate Scientist)

33!!!

I am 33!!!

The same age as Jesus Christ, yet I managed to avoid crucifixion, as a friend/colleague aptly put it.