Wisdom, or lack thereof…

It’s taken thirty years to convince my lonely wisdom tooth to emerge from his burrow… It was a tiny sliver of enamel poking up of my upper-right mandible, only a couple of years ago… Then, it came out bit by bit, and my tongue learned every feature of its contorted surface. It never was much of help in chewing, having come out sideways compared to the other teeth. But alas, I didn’t mind too much – it was a welcome (well tolerated) guest in my mouth…

Wisdom teeth have, by the way, quite an interesting scientific story. They come out later in life, after you’ve been adult for a while, and that’s why they’re called wisdom teeth. At least, that’s my educated guess. Why do they come out later in life? because this way our ancestors would have at least a spare tooth when the other molars were rotten, or just too worn out. I guess they used them on much tougher food that we do today… Charles Darwin himself cites the wisdom teeth as ‘rudimentary’, in “The descent of Man‘, which I am reading right now in the new, concise edition curated by Carl Zimmer.

But let’s go back to my single lonely tooth. Suddenly, just a couple of weeks ago, a dull pain started to manifest itself, and playing with my tongue and finger over it (just imagine the scene) I self-diagnosed that the last, invisible addition to the smile had started to push against the neighbor… yesterday took a dive and, for the first time in years, and only the third time in life, I went to the dentist.

She opened my mouth wide open, looking inside and poking with her shiny metal tools… And prodding around, found a cavity, my first cavity, in my little wisdom tooth… The bastard. Last one to come out, first one to cause me troubles… }8-[

She suggested to take it out, and I buggered off with an excuse (not before being asked to pay 84 Euros for the privilege), with the promise that I’ll show up next wednesday to let her play a bit more with her pliers and drills.

She has, I noticed when she took out her mask, the most beautiful lips I’ve ever seen up close. Hopefully, having a crash on my dentist will help me bear the pain she’ll inflict me. Ouch!

Stay tuned. More to follow…

Every little helps…

On 15/02/2008, An ingenuous friend wrote me:

SE GOOGLE AVESSE UNO SCHERMO NERO, VISTA LA GRANDE QUANTITA’ DI
PERSONE
CHE LO USANO, SI CALCOLA CHE SI RISPARMIEREBBERO CIRCA
750MEGAWATT/ORA.

COME RISPOSTA A QUESTO GOOGLE HA CREATO UNA VERSIONE IN NERO,
CHIAMATA
BLACKLE, CON ESATTAMENTE LE STESSE FUNZIONI DI QUELLA IN BIANCO, CON
UN
CONSUMO DI ENERGIA MINORE… INOLTRE STANCA MOLTO MENO GLI OCCHI!!!

FALLO SAPERE E USALO, OGNI PICCOLA COSA CONTA.

http://www.neroogle.it

Scusate il francesismo, ma che coglionata.

La lampada dietro al mio schermo LCD resta accesa sia che il pixel sia bianco, sia nero.

Il colore e’ dato dal pixel stesso che filtra la luce, facendola passare o meno…

Nel caso dei tubi catodici vale la stessa cosa, visto che il consumo principale e’ dato dal tenere il cannone elettronico ad alto voltaggio, non dalla corrente effettiva sparata contro lo schermo. D’oh!!!

Ma chi si inventa certe cose?

Luca

Yuk!!!

George Bush at one recent G8 meeting, caught in the act of massaging Angela Merkel…

Ewww… May be he wanted to seduce her off the Tokyo Treaty?

Loosing my Italian

It’s finally happening. Mentre il mio amico Paolo festeggia l’avvento del suo inglese nativo, cioe’ del momento in cui parla direttamente in questa lingua invece che dover tradurre back and forth dall’italiano, io mi rendo conto del contrario. Quando leggo in Italiano, mi suona strano, e cerco continuamente di ritradurlo in inglese, come a correggere gli errori di un incompetente (ma inesistente) doppiatore.

Arrgh!!!

LolCats!!!

I discovered yesterday this fantastic internet phenomenon of taking pictures of animals and adding funny caption to them, most often in a degenerate, gangster-rapper-like form of English language.

Here’s one example:

It has been hard to get back to work after seeing the first few, yesterday.
In between the piccies I also found a funny movie posted on youtube:

So go here for moar funny pictures.

EurAsia V Americas

I break for one post the diary from Africa series.

When I was a child in primary school, my teacher asked us to jot down a story with us as characters. Most people would have written about a picnic, I went for a Science-Fiction-Thriller.

At the height of the Cold War, I imagined a near future where Europe and Russia were united together, and the enemy was a super-state born from the US’s annexion of most of the Americas. In this story, me and my classmate had to skate all the way up to Moscow to disable a weapon or explain a situation to some powerful man sitting in the Cremlin, and wish away a war. Crazy stuff uh?

I was reminded of this this morning when I heard that Poland is now joining the EU’s Schengen Area. This is causing lots of protests from Ukrainian, who were used to freely cross the Polish border to trade (food for tobacco and alcool), but now an’t any longer. I guess they will be the next to enter the EU, then. yet, I was surprised by how quickly the EU has grown during my lifetime… Where will it stop? At the South, Turkey is pressing to enter, how much before the whole Mediterranean Sea is encircled by it?

At the same time, a US Homeland Security officer yells that Europe is a breeding ground for the terrorists’ next generation… May be my childish story caught the attention of a much more influential storyteller… (that’s megalomania, for you)

Look out, there’s a Lion behind that bus!!!

copy-paste from Null-Hypothesis , which dubs itself as The Journal of Unlikely Science. It came to me through the facebook group We’re scientists AND we’re sexy! Ok, I admit, I am a member of it. Yeah, right. Me. Sexy. Ouch! It Hurts.

I Tawt I Taw A Puddy Tat

Scientists in California have been busy flashing images at people again. This is a favourite game of psychophysicists the world over, being a nice way of measuring reaction times to… well, Visual Things. This time they’ve been looking to see if people pay more attention to evolutionarily salient objects like lions and impala rather than novelties like cars, tables and lamps.

The result will come as no surprise to the evolutionary psychologists in the crowd. When presented with pairs of images, each flashed rapidly and identical except for a tiny change, participants were much faster and more accurate at identifying changes involving animals (including humans) than those involving your aforementioned inanimate things, even if the animal was hardly visible at all. This also held true when a failure to notice the inanimate object in the scenes would normally be associated with sudden and messy death, such as is the case with cars.

The explanation? Well, back in the day, humans would have benefited from attention to things that they could hunt and eat (like impala) as well as to things that could eat them (like lions) and things that may have filled both categories (like… each other). Humans who ignored these objects moving about would presumably have died from either a) starvation or b) being killed and/or eaten, so a tendency to attend to animate objects became hardwired in to the human visual system. Things like cars, although life threatening, are just far too modern to have been incorporated.

So, the good news is that you are very likely to spot a big cat as it sneaks up on you with every intention of making you its lunch. Sadly, in moving to avoid it, you may just end up being crushed beneath the wheels of a bus you have entirely failed to notice. Ah well, swings and roundabouts, eh?

Talk about Health and Safety

This movie shows how a railway can become… a market!!!

from: here to: eternity

Rosario Elettronico.

And from the blog of the guy who was once my comic book pusher, comes the electronic rosario.