Adriano

"People say my films are dark. But like lightness, darkness stems from a reflection of the world. The thing is, I get these ideas that I truly fall in love with. And a good movie idea is often like a girl you're in love with, but you know she's not the kind of girl you bring home to your parents, because they sometimes hold some dark and troubling things." - Adriano

Markus Covert et al. used data from more than 900 scientific papers to account for every molecular interaction that takes place in the life cycle of Mycoplasma genitalium which contains the smallest genome of any free-living organism: 525 genes. Complex phenotypes can be modeled by integrating cell processes into a single model. Unobserved cellular behaviors, new biological processes and parameters are predicted by this bio-CAD model -- including in vivo rates of protein-DNA association and an inverse relationship between the durations of DNA replication initiation and replication. \\ A giant step for Artificial Life! - Adriano

"Nolan’s Bruce-Batman has oscillated between seemingly opposite poles, even as he’s always come out a superhero. He is savior and destroyer, human and beast, the ultimate radical individualist and people’s protector. Yet as the series evolved, this binary opposition has grown progressively messier, less discrete. In between juggling the cool bat toys, demure kisses, hard punches and loud bangs, Nolan has layered barely veiled references to terrorism, the surveillance state and vengeance as a moral imperative. His kinetic filmmaking pulses with realism and to the primal fear that the people could at any moment, as in the French Revolution, become the mob that drags the rest of us into chaos. Nolan shifts between a multitude of characters and as many locations without losing you, his narrative thread or momentum. His playfulness with the scenes-within-scenes in his last movie, "Inception," has paid off here -- the controlled fragmentation works on a pleasurable, purely cinematic level." - Adriano

cancelling this weekend... as Baudrillard would say, "it is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody -- it's rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself." - Adriano

"No ink. No pencils. Just shadows and light on folded white paper. German artist Simon Schubert creates gorgeous images of architectural masterpieces by folding plain, white cellulose paper. As a paper sculptor, Schubert is a master of shadow and light; the depth of each fold measures just millimeters, yet each one creates just enough shade to give them the illusion of palatial quarters. The huge empty rooms in Schubert’s works convey a feeling of isolation and loneliness. Inspired by Samuel Beckett, whose image was his first paper folding project, and Edgar Allen Poe, he sticks to themes mystery to “confront the viewer with his own subconscious fears and anxieties.”" - Adriano

These are amazing ... absolutely gorgeous and so detailed! - Sepi ⌘ سپی

Very cool. If Robb sees that he'll have to try I fear. He one built an amazing 3D paper sphere (out of manually cut out paper rings) for a pop up card... Best I dont show him. - Iphigenie

""We get into something akin to a trance with great storytelling," says psychiatrist Norman DOIDGE, author of _The Brain That Changes Itself_. Viewers identify with characters on screen and subconsciously begin to mimic their emotions -- be it sadness or triumph or anxiety -- and each emotional state triggers different brain chemicals, which linger. "These tend to be protracted states," he says. The urge to sustain that inner experience leads you to press "play" on the next episode, and the one after that -- the equivalent of the book you can't put down. Longer, uninterrupted viewing sessions can lead to "a deeper virtual-reality experience of the narrative. It can seem more real, from a neurological point of view."" - Adriano

time to pull the GODFATHER series and do a run.. LOL - Peter Dawson

"History works like this, he said: One army defeats another, and in march its genes and memes. He said there’s also a tautology latent in “the survival of the fittest” that has nothing to do with bad armies and good citizens. It’s that we don’t really have a good definition of “fittest.” We really just know, and it lines up irrefutably in our meager human language here: whatever survives, survives." \\ In short, Darwin's theory is descriptive, not predictive. - Adriano

thinking about the consequences of placing artificial life [e.g. http://ff.im/11eLAC w/ http://ff.im/113ViJ] in a natural habitat without notice to the field biologists -- could be a mind fork if it started reproducing :-) - Adriano

"Il faut d'abord bien comprendre que les dinosaures avaient une "ouverture unique" appelée cloaque pour uriner, déféquer et se reproduire. Le même orifice unique qu'ont aujourd'hui les oiseaux, les reptiles, les marsupiaux, les amphibiens et certains poissons. Ainsi, pour s'accoupler, les dinosaures devaient appuyer sur leur cloaque ensemble. Pour ce "baiser cloacal", un pénis n'était pas nécessaire." - Adriano

"The whole street in covered in graffiti, and that means 100% of it!! Probably unique in the world..." - Adriano

#togolist :-)) the former is one of the top ten scuba diving sites in the world, 124 meters deep. - Adriano

"French comic artist and illustrator Blexbolex may be best-known for his contemplative meditations on people and time, aimed at children yet agelessly delightful and thought-provoking, but he is also a masterful explorer of complex grown-up themes. _No Man’s Land_ is a poignant satire of the mind’s well-documented gift for fooling itself and seducing us into our own hand-spun illusory realities. Printed in three spot-colors, screenprint-like, on beautiful matte paper -- Blexbolex’s signature style -- it tells the story of a hero spiraling into an implausible dreamland in hopeless escapism from the processes of mortality." - Adriano

"Which computers does blink(1) work with? Just about anything with a USB jack. Specifically, blink(1) is a USB HID-compliant device and the apps we release for it work on Mac OS X 10.6+, Windows XP+, Ubuntu/Debian-style Linux. The command-line tools can be compiled for just about any POSIX-compliant Unix-style platform including the Raspberry Pi, DD-WRT WiFi routers, BeagleBone, and some Android phones." - Adriano

I was there some time ago... driving along the seacoast to Catania. :-) - Amira

"Orozco [in dark blue shirt] has created sculptural and photographic installations from the rubble he gathered on two sites in New York and in Baja California, Mexico. The objects that are displayed in a vitrine are detritus that Gabriel Orozco gathered at a playing field in New York City. Sandstars consists of 1,200 objects that now form a monumental sculptural carpet on the gallery floor. The sculptural work is accompanied by large-scale gridded photographs of images of the individual objects. Gabriel Orozco photographed the objects under natural lighting conditions in his studio and then arranged them according to their material, color, size, etc. Asterisms is the 18th and final project in the Deutsche Guggenheim's commission program that started in 1997." - Adriano

"A partir de la mort de sa mère, Sophie Calle a monté une exposition au Cloître des Célestins, à Avignon. Si vous avez de la chance, vous tomberez au moment où elle lit le journal intime de sa mère, morte en 2006. A part les pages publiées dans son livre aux éditions Xavier Barral et choisies par une amie, l'artiste assure qu'elle ne l'a pas lu avant et qu'elle le découvre en même temps que le public. Elle le fait sans prévenir, et elle lit autant qu'elle veut. Avec une seule contrainte : finir le journal (16 cahiers ) avant la fin de l'exposition." http://www.festival-avignon.com - Adriano

"Good espresso is good chemistry. It’s all about precision and consistency and finding the perfect balance between grind, temperature, and pressure. Espresso happens at the molecular level. This is why technology has been such an important part of the historical development of espresso and a key to the ongoing search for the perfect shot. While espresso was never designed per se, the machines that make our cappuccinos have a history that stretches back more than a century. Great espresso depends on the four M’s: Macchina, the espresso machine; Macinazione, the proper grinding of a beans –a uniform grind between fine and powdery– which is ideally done moments brewing the drink; Miscela, the coffee blend and the roast, and Mano is the skilled hand of the barista, because even with the finest beans and the most advanced equipment, the shot depends on the touch and style of the barista." - Adriano

to create perfect balance :-) - Sepi ⌘ سپی

BTW, "Life is a process of dynamic renewal. We're all shedding about 500 million skin cells every day. That is the dust that accumulates in your home; that's you. You shed your entire outer layer of skin every two to four weeks." --J. Craig Venter, http://edge.org/convers... :-) - Adriano

"There is a "nightmare scenario" that particle physicists have worried about for years: Finding exactly the Standard Model Higgs and nothing else. I personally assign the nightmare scenario very low probability. We know the Standard Model is not right; there is dark matter, there is dark energy, there is baryogenesis, there are the hierarchy and cosmological constant and strong-CP problems. It can’t be the final answer. Seems to me much more likely that there is interesting physics at the weak scale above and beyond the Higgs, than we just get stuck with a vanilla Standard Model. There is the wishful hope that the Higgs itself leads directly to new physics. Example: in many models of dark matter as weakly-interacting massive particles, the dominant way that dark matter and ordinary matter interact is through exchange of Higgs bosons. If that’s how nature works, the Higgs is literally a portal from our world to another. This isn’t the end of the show, it’s merely an act break (as we say in the movie biz)." - Adriano

Another good live-blog: http://www.quora.com/Jay-Wac... by Jay Wacker, "17:53: Fabiola Gianotti begins ATLAS presentation with Comic Sans prominently chosen again. Some jokes about what the press thinks the Higgs boson looks like. Slides are nearly unreadable. Uggh." - Adriano

"CMS team said they had identified a boson with a mass of 125.3 billion electron volts, about 100 times the mass of a proton. The Atlas team said they had seen a mass of 126 billion electron volts. Both observations are now at what researchers call the five-sigma level, which means that there is only about one chance in 3.5 million that the results are produced by chance. That is the level of certainty researchers generally require before announcing the "discovery" of a particle. The two teams will now spend many years trying to characterize the properties of the new particle and determine whether it is a unique entity or just one of several different forms of the Higgs boson. If there proves to be one and only one Higgs boson, its discovery would provide confirmation of the so-called Standard Model of physics. If there are more than one form, then theorists might have to develop a revised model of how the universe works." - Adriano

"In his 1993 book, "The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What is the Question?" Nobel laureate Leon Lederman half-jokingly coined the term God particle because the Higgs boson is so crucial to the existence of the universe. Peter Higgs was present at the CERN announcement." -ibid. \\ N.B. couple days ago, data from the U.S. Department of Energy's Tevatron collider near Chicago indicated that the Higgs—if it exists—is consistent with a mass of 125 GeV. "We have enough to get me excited that I'd be willing to bet your house it's real but not enough to bet my house," said particle physicist Rob Roser. - Adriano

Stephen Hawking on Higgs boson: 'Discovery has lost me $100' -- video http://www.bbc.co.uk/news... [bet made a decade ago was lost to Gordon Kane, physics prof. at University of Michigan] - Adriano

According to Tuts, Lederman originally called it the *Goddamn* Particle.... Greene shows Charlie Rose the Standard Model on a t-shirt... 23-min video: http://www.charlierose.com/view... - Adriano

"6) People will post stuff you don't care about, here, there, anywhere. You don't like cats or sports or whatever? Complain if you want, but there's always other stuff. 8) Try and bring in someone new every now and then. You never know, they might love it. - Stephen Mack" \\ I pledge to post more kittens. Dunbar? https://friendfeed.com/search... meeow, I want to reply! - Adriano

"Consume in small, frequent amounts. Between 20-200 mg/hour may be an optimal dose for cognitive function. Caffeine's effects can be maximized or minimized depending on what else is in your system at the time. Definitely add sugar. Grapefruit juice may prolong the effects of caffeine, while nicotine may speed up the body's metabolism of it." \\ I've been drinking **grapefruit juice** in the mornings with coffee for the last couple of months -- surprisingly, it does seem to work as noted! Comment on your experience. \\ Details from Chatham here: http://scienceblogs.com/develop... - Adriano

"Caffeine (0.3mg per kg of body weight [approx 20 mg per hour]) can support extended wakefulness, potentially by counteracting the homeostatic sleep pressure. Recall from memory may be improved by caffeine, possibly due to enhancements in memory encoding rather than retrieval per se. Theanine might actually potentiate the benefits of caffeine." -ibid. Grapefruit juice studies: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites... and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed... - Adriano

"They collected 1000 narrative reports and mined the text for common words using machine learning techniques. Having identified signature words, they then tested their hypothesis by seeing whether the results could be used to accurately predict which drug the reports referred to. Ecstasy reports tends to use words such as "club", "hug", "rub" and "smile", which reflect the social setting in which the drug is often used and the feelings of love and friendliness the drug seems to produce. Coyle was able to accurately identify Ecstasy reports almost 90% of the time. LSD and magic mushrooms are both associated with words such as "see", "look", "saw", "room", "tell", "ask", "walk", "house". DMT and Salvia are associated with words such as "reality", "dimension", "universe", "state", "consciousness", "form", "entity". These clusters of words allow speculation about the receptors and signalling pathways in the brain that the drugs target." http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.0312 - Adriano

"The Ankonian is a more aggressive version of Lamborghini's supercar, the Reventón. Being black in colour, this concept looks as if it was inspired by a stealth jet fighter. It is not certain that the Ankonian will go into production." \\ Slideshow of the provocative Lamborghini Ankonian Concept Design by Slavche Tanevski : http://youtu.be/9vEc2JLnT78 - Adriano

"Color is a private sensation. "The reason we feel happy when we see red, orange and yellow light is because we're stimulating this ancient blue-yellow visual system," Neitz said. "But our conscious perception of blue and yellow comes from a completely different circuitry — the cone cells. So the fact that we have similar emotional reactions to different lights doesn't mean our perceptions of the color of the light are the same." People with damage to parts of the brain involved in the perception of colors may not be able to perceive blue, red or yellow, but they would still be expected to have the same emotional reaction to the light as everyone else. Similarly, even if you perceive the sky as the color someone else would call "red," your blue sky still makes you feel calm." - Adriano

"The existence of the rainbow depends on the conical photoreceptors in your eyes; to animals without cones, the rainbow does not exist. So you don’t just look at a rainbow, you create it. This is pretty amazing, especially considering that all the beautiful colors you see represent less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum.” http://lunarscience.nasa.gov/article... - Amira

See also discussion on Quora: 'Is everyone's experience of color the same?' http://www.quora.com/Visual-... - Amira

"Michael SERVETUS (1511-1553) credited with discovering pulmonary circulation. He wrote a book, which outlined his discovery along with his ideas about reforming Christianity -- it was deemed to be heretical. Under orders from John Calvin, Servetus was arrested, tortured and burned at the stake on the shores of Lake Geneva. \\ When Hitler came to power in January 1933, Albert EINSTEIN was in California and was almost immediately deprived of his posts in Berlin and his membership of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. His property was seized and his books were burned in public. \\ After admitting to "homosexual acts" in 1952, Alan TURING was prosecuted and had to make the choice between a custodial sentence or chemical castration through hormone injections. Injections of oestrogen were intended to deal with "abnormal and uncontrollable" sexual urges. Turing experienced some disturbing side effects, including impotence, breast swelling, mood changes and an overall "feminization."" - Adriano

"There was a saying: 'Empty is that philosopher's argument by which no human suffering is therapeutically treated', and they said it was like medicine and if the doctor had an elegant theory but he couldn't cure the patient, that was no good. But Pyrrhonists said, 'Look, what gets people into trouble is they have definite views about how the world is, and of course then sometimes those views turn out to be wrong and especially in areas like ethics, they think a certain thing is right, then when the opposite happens, they get very upset. So he said the way not to be upset is don't have any stake in the world, just sort of go with the flow and then you will never be surprised and never be upset." - Adriano

Alan Sanders, the host asked the interesting question, "Is there a danger of subordinating truth and good reasoning to psychological health?" The transcript is hidden behind the main link. Info on Nussbaum's book: http://press.princeton.edu/titles... - Adriano

This was always one of my favorites in studying philosophy, where they ran into such a perceptual conundrum - first that they couldn't know anything, then that just saying they couldn't know anything was too much - that they just threw up their hands, lived in caves and never spoke again! - kate simmons

if we avoid arguments, overall it's maladaptive... worth pondering: http://ff.im/CFbAW related to the survival of the fittest memes. - Adriano

"Science is a marvel—an instrument fueled by curiosity and caffeine that spews forth answers to fundamental questions about nature. The funny thing about this seeming cornucopia of ideas, however, is that the more we learn about the universe, the less we seem to know. Every result yields new conundrums that frequently outnumber the settled issues. We might think we're striding down the road to ultimate knowledge, when in fact we're on a treadmill that occasionally—if only temporarily—sweeps us backward. This is the gritty reality of the scientific process: Bafflement and outright error are inevitable." - Adriano

The Picture is killing me ... :-)) - Sepi ⌘ سپی

""Naming and Necessity," is lucidly, inventively and even playfully argued -- it's actually a transcription of three lectures Kripke gave, extemporaneously and without notes, at Princeton in January 1970 -- hence its lovely conversational tone. Ranging over deep matters like metaphysical necessity, the a priori and the mind-body problem, Kripke proceeds by way of a dazzling series of examples involving Salvador Dalí and Sir Walter Scott, the standard meter stick in Paris, Richard Nixon (plus David Fry’s impersonation of him), and an identity-like logical relation Kripke calls "schmidentity." There is not a dogmatic or pompous word in the lectures -- and not a dull one either. Kripke the analytic philosopher reveals himself to be a literary stylist of the first water." - Adriano

Your eBook is reading you: "It's no secret that Amazon and other digital book retailers track and store consumer information detailing what books are purchased and read. Kindle users sign an agreement granting the company permission to store information from the device—including the last page you've read, plus your bookmarks, highlights, notes and annotations—in its data servers. Amazon can identify which passages of digital books are popular with readers, and shares some of this data publicly on its website through features such as its "most highlighted passages" list." - Adriano

super amazing !! "First shot is from Trond Teigen. Basejumping in Lauterbrunnen, The Eiger, Jungfrau, Kjerag and Bispen." - Adriano

Rapturous ... :-) - Sepi ⌘ سپی

I sorta knew a certain S. adrenaline rush junkie would like it :-) - Adriano

hehehehe ... that was really fast ... :-) - Sepi ⌘ سپی

"If you have a system that is as intelligent as a human and really is convincing in its emotional responses and can make us laugh and cry, then my belief is, it is conscious. And it'll get mad at us if we don't believe it's conscious. [E]motion is not some sort of sideshow; there's intelligence and then there's emotion. Emotion is all these high-level concepts. It's the most sophisticated thing we do. Being funny, being sexy, being loving, these are very complicated and intelligent behaviors. [Y]ou probably think those high-level pattern recognizers are much more complicated than the low-level ones. They're actually exactly the same. We are learning how these modules work, how they wire themselves. The technique that we have evolved in AI is mathematically equivalent to what the brain is doing." - Adriano

"As you'd expect, nobody can hear the difference between a 320kbps CBR audio file and the CD. From the basic summary statistics graph only one audio sample here was discernably different than the rest—the 128kbps CBR. And by different I mean "audibly worse." I've maintained for a long, long time that typical 128kbps MP3s are not acceptable quality. Even for the worst song ever. So I guess we can consider this yet another blind listening test proving that point. Give us VBR at an average bitrate higher than 128kbps, or give us death!" - Adriano

yeah, Cristo, for a zero sampling rate is almost equivalent to a deletion from your song list :-) - Adriano

I wonder how much this has to do with the Loudness War. - Akiva

when range compression is abused to get more peak amplitudes, I run the tunes through normalize-mp3 which helps esp. when a playlist contains different genres. That problem is independent of the sampling bitrate though. Normalization does also help boost older feeble recordings. - Adriano

The last words of painter J.M.W. Turner were "the sun is God," which is surprisingly reflected in almost all mythologies. He painted some of the most magnificent clouds. But the photo set above via http://ff.im/ZaqSs is damn good. - Adriano