ForTheScience.org

StackExchange sites proliferation

Stefano Borini — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 13:03:19 +0000

I am observing with great interest the development at Area51 for new Question/Answers sites to be opened with the StackExchange system. One thing that makes me cringe a bit is the very strong fragmentation. I think this stems either from the need of personal protagonism of each person (nothing bad with it, progress happens also [...]

The Mandelbrot set, in python

Stefano Borini — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 17:02:23 +0000

This code is so fascinating from PIL import Image max_iteration = 1000 x_center = -1.0 y_center = 0.0 size = 300 im = Image.new("RGB", (size,size)) for i in xrange(size): for j in xrange(size): x,y = ( x_center + 4.0*float(i-size/2)/size, [...]

A Question/Answers site for Popular Science

Stefano Borini — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 22:47:25 +0000

The kind folks behind StackOverflow, a free Question/Answers website for programming questions, recently decided to open new Q/A websites for many additional interesting topics, from wine tasting and cooking to mathematics. The fundamental requisite for such new sites to be opened is a rather strict community review and development of a critical mass of contributors [...]

McNaught comet in the sky, and pics of Hale Bopp

Stefano Borini — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 07:35:35 +0000

The McNaught comet, or C/2009 R1, is likely to be visible in the night sky starting tonight, for a week. You should be able to spot it near the constellation of Perseus as a fuzzy streak of light. The comet should be visible with a small binocular, or just with the naked eye. In particular, I [...]

The future of entertainment is here

Stefano Borini — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 14:50:20 +0000

Please take a look at this This technology is probably the future of entertainment. It needs no batteries, has a nice resolution both for pictures and text, it can be easily bookmarked or annotated (although sometimes there’s not enough space). It can be bought both online and in a shop, brand new or used. It is [...]

Linux dominates in supercomputing

Stefano Borini — Mon, 31 May 2010 15:36:51 +0000

Nothing new under the Sun, but the very interesting presentation makes it very cool to see. I just got to this article at BBC about the Top500 supercomputer list, where a very nice Treemap graph presents supercomputers according to their computational power. By selecting the Operating System, the dominance of Linux is staggering, confirming its [...]

Craig Venter programs a bacterium from scratch

Stefano Borini — Fri, 21 May 2010 07:43:05 +0000

As you probably heard in the news, Craig Venter, the American biologist best known for starting up Celera Genomics and sequencing the human genome, achieved another big success. He created a fully working new bacterium, programming its DNA from scratch. Like a computer having hardware and software, a bacterium has a set of components that execute [...]

Eight molecules that changed the rules of the game: Benzene

Stefano Borini — Mon, 17 May 2010 07:00:07 +0000

Rule changed: stimulated research to explain electronic resonance. Except for its nice regular hexagonal shape, benzene is not a nice compound. It is toxic, carcinogen, highly flammable, burns with a very dirty and smoky flame, and if it is not enough, it made chemists go crazy for one hundred years. The latter point is interesting for [...]

About class attributes, semantics and microformats

Stefano Borini — Wed, 12 May 2010 01:29:25 +0000

I just got to this post by Richard le Guen via the referrals to my blog, and I feel it’s important to clarify my point. So, let’s describe the problem. In HTML, you describe the layout of your information. How the information will look like is “presentation” and is managed via a so called Cascading Style [...]

Translations!

Stefano Borini — Tue, 04 May 2010 17:07:31 +0000

I decided to add a rather demanding additional requirement to my blogging activities: I added multiple language support. From now on, posts will also be available in Italian, by selecting the proper option on the top-right corner of the page. I will not post only when both translations are available. Instead, I will continue blogging in [...]