A white Easter has come and gone, with some friends from the UK over to visit us. It was nice and we had a good time, toruing around and eating lots of good stuff…
Also, they acted as surrogate Easter Bunnies, delivering to me a new pair of isolating ear-phones for my MP3 listening, plus the ultimate gadget, a GPS-enabled watch with cardio-pulse recorder…
Now I can finally track my errings, up and down belgium, within a few metres… Now particularly interesting I know, but it’ll come in handy when I want to geo-tag some pictures during trips and so on… Plus I can upload my tracks and treks to Google Earth, to look at them frm above and brag about with my friends
She really is a fairy… Thanks to her magic powder (aka Lidocaine) I did not feel a thing when she injected me the real anesthetic. After that it was just a matter of pulling for half an hour and sewing me back…
The Health Insurance apparently will not cover this as I am not yet 65, but at least I got to keep the tooth. Will post a picture of it soon.
There it is, in all its g(l)ory… I better rest now… Anesthesia is wearing off and a dull pain is mounting up…
I finally managed to post a video from youtube… exactly as I used to do in blogspot.
Still have no idea why it didn’t work at first… Gremlins, may be?
On another topic, I saw two days ago Bee Movie, and to be quite frank, I didn’t like it. The acting is OK, the technical part too. Unfortunately, this movies gets the crown for most biologically confusing movie ever. if there only was such an Oscar. Just checked, there isn’t. Too bad.
Really though, I can forgive the fact that within the hive bees are made to live in suburbs kind of housing, with swimming pool full of honey(!), cars and such… I can understand a metaphore when I see one.
I can forget picturing the hive itself as a factory, for the same reason…
I even enjoyed the suing action brought by the little guy to get back the honey ’stolen’ by the humans…
But… When the honey is pumped in and all bees get lazy and stop working, and pollinating, the whole world become grey and all plants die suddenly, as if pollination was some kind of magic the bees perform to keep everything in balance.
The absurdity is finally topped up by the dynamic duo going to the rescue of the world by using the few residual pollen grains (from roses, come out from GOD knows where) to repollinate indiscriminately any vegetable species they happen to come around… urgh!!!
I know I know it’s a kid cartoons, but so were “A bug’s life” and “Antz“. And they both were much better at painting insects’ life…
Frankly, I am disappointed by DreamWorks recent forays in the animation realm… Did they loose the magic touch after Shrek?
Yesterday instead, I awarded my own 8+ to Les Poupées russes, for its light hearted humour and very nice montage…
Tonight the lady is at work so may be I’ll blast “The Host“, or may be something else. who knows?
Following the example of the Rabbit, I may soon be moving to WordPress, importing all my old post and such over there.
The reason, quite simply, is the lack of pre-made 3-columns templates on Blogger.
I know I could modify myself the html to allow for that, but I can’t be arsed. After all, that’s the age of internet 2.0, we users are not supposed to know what html is, exactly like you don’t need to know electronics to operate a TV. And since I am no enginneer and want a wide-screen blog in these times of wide-everything, I am getting a new one exactly how I would get a new TV.
PS: I will possibly use the opportunity to start another, science-only related blog. I haven’t decided yet what its name is going to be, but I will try to write down a diary of what my work is about… Let’s see how it shapes up…
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!
I am considering to buy one, to keep in the car more or less always, so that when I need to go some medium distance I can use it…
For example in Antwerp, where parking in the centre is impossible and/or expensive, it’d be nice to park far from it, for free, then cycle there in two or three minutes.
Same at work, when I need to go to the bank, or the doctor, and so on…
The problem, is they’re quite pricey… I’ve been suggested to go buy them in the netherlands where the market is larger and I could probably get a fair price for a model from last year… uhm…
The one you can see in the picture is a cool prototype… Called The Locust, probably because of its green color.
Let’s see if I have any money left by the end of the month…
Since I often comment about news I read on the i.net, and now I don’t get much time to wrte on them, I put up a new feed burner with a few of those I think it would be nice to share with you. It’s all thanks to google’s reader, which I restarted using since my blogroll was getting too long to keep a daily eye on all of them…
On the diary side of my life, I managed to start correcting the paper and hopefully will get it done by the end of the week. If I can get away from the internet, that is…
I am bored. I should correct my paper and get it finally submitted, but it’s stronger than me and can’t just decide whether to accept the corrections suggested by a co-author or not…
Scientific publications are so troublesome (at least for me) that I am almost tempted to give up on this career and pursuit a job in finance (lol, not really) or any other field where you are not required to write up your stuff. It’s not that I don’t want to share, I am more than happy of that and well willing to talk about my work. It’s just that I am very very bad at writing up, possibly because none of the endless literature courses during my school in Italy ever concentrated on the basic of good and understandable writing.
IYou can see it from how long the previous phrase was. In Italy long phrases, branching in two or three nested level get you a premium by the professor. Ow, all this sucks. I wish I was like many of my colleagues, with a much wider cultural span but much more ‘able’ to do the job… They’re like very sharp knives, good to cut steaks, whereas I am the jack of all knives (d`uh!) – with multiple skills but none up to an acceptable level.
Enough complaining. I’m leaving work early to discover the joys of having a Makro card – Then I will try to correct the paper in the evening at home, with the advantage of Word XP which lets you see the correction and the original at once…
I’ve pasted a big scarlet A in my profile. For the non-cognoscendi, this is to show to everybody on the planet (well everybody with an internet connection) that I am an Atheist.
Yes, one of those godless creatures that only rely on their own judgement to act morally and make the world a better place, out of personal interest and not for fear of punishment.
With this, I mean not to despise people who feel that belief is important in their life, and certainly I don’t want to stay on the side of those who assert religions are at all costs a bad things. I believe that they have a certain value, if nothing else as a way for humans to cope with a very very complex and indifferent universe. It must have had an evolutionary advantage, otherwise it would not be here. Or to be more precise, what caused religions to develop in our minds must have ALSO had an evolutionary advantage. May be religion is just a side-effect of arts, or story-telling?
Alas, I hope it’s just a short transitory phase in our evolutionary path… Kind of teenagers’ mood swings.
But back to the big scarlet A, you can click on it to get one yourself. Or not. Your choice.
To get rid of my only wisdom tooth.
