ForTheScience.org

The subtle art of writing a code example

Stefano Borini — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 06:10:09 +0000

One of the most frustrating experiences when learning a new technology is finding useless examples. An example is the most precious thing that comes with a new library, language, or technology. It must be a starting point, a wise and unadulterated explanation on how to achieve a given result. A perfect example must have the [...]

Large quake occurs near Chile.

Stefano Borini — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 17:09:58 +0000

A magnitude 8.8 quake occurred in Chile. A tsunami warning has been issued. Very good details, and a map of the predicted height of the tsunami across all the pacific can be found at Phil Plait’s blog. Apparently, Japan is not concerned about the Tsunami, which should hit around 3 AM GMT (12AM Japanese time). The [...]

New paper published on Journal of Physical Chemistry A

Stefano Borini — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 06:30:43 +0000

The paper I submitted some time ago at the Journal of Physical Chemistry A has been published: Borini S, Limacher PA, Luethi HP, “Structural Features Analysis and Nonlinearity of End-Cap-Substituted Polyacetylenes”, DOI: 10.1021/jp908439x I already wrote about the findings reported in this paper at the time it was accepted. It is a very nice paper, and [...]

Eight molecules that changed the rules of the game: Diethyl Ether

Stefano Borini — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 19:45:03 +0000

With this post I want to start a series about single molecules whose synthesis, discovery, or explanation had such dramatic effects for humanity to produce a complete paradigm shift for daily life or scientific insight. On purpose, I left out the “big ones”: you will not find DNA in this list, nor you will find [...]

My business card, with QR-code. Geeky!

Stefano Borini — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:51:12 +0000

I ran out of business cards recently, so I had to make new ones. I took the chance to indulge a bit over the QR-Code, a two-dimensional barcode you can find on everything in Japan. It’s a pretty nice barcode system, very stable with respect to corruption and quite ok in terms of capacity. Among [...]

Please donate for the Haiti earthquake

Stefano Borini — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 04:15:31 +0000

After the recent tragic events in Haiti, it is a priority to help doctors without borders as much as possible. Please donate, even a small amount from a lot of people can make a sizable difference.

How I ate Fugu and survived to tell the tale

Stefano Borini — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 12:24:05 +0000

Some time ago I had Fugu, or puffer fish, a highly poisonous fish with no known antidote. Here is a picture to document the fact Well, it could just be me in front of something that looks like fish, and I’m not going to eat it anyway, but trust me, I had it. Yes, I wanted [...]

Image self consistency from xkcd

Stefano Borini — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 13:02:07 +0000

I love xkcd. A comic combining fun and math by definition has to be good and geeky and the author, Randall Munroe, is a real genius on this. The latest comic is pretty interesting The image is self-descriptive, meaning that each graph represents information about the image itself. For example, the first panel contains a pie [...]

How much statistics should one know ?

Stefano Borini — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 08:29:23 +0000

I just wrote an answer to this very interesting question on Stackoverflow. Now, as a disclaimer, I’m not an expert in statistics, but I did enough statistics to “know the beast”, or at least what are the dangers. I will rearrange my answer for this post, to address the more general case. The main issue is [...]

Periodic table of videos

Stefano Borini — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 16:56:04 +0000

I found this very interesting site about the periodic table of elements, from the University of Nottingham. For each element, there’s a video showing the characteristics of the element, and a brief commentary. Worth checking out if you always had some curiosity about the chemical elements, what they look like, and how they behave. They also [...]