ForTheScience.org

Fortran 90 pitfall: initialization of vars at declaration

Stefano Borini — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 12:27:03 +0000

I am dusting my Fortran 90 skills. One big gotcha that always leaves me baffled is the following. Suppose you write the following program program test implicit none call testsub() call testsub() end program subroutine testsub() implicit none integer :: var var = 0 print *, var var = 5 print [...]

Fear the crowd. Digg 4 spurs users’ revolt.

Stefano Borini — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 15:30:20 +0000

The community-powered news site Digg played an occasional role on the development of this blog. Some of the findings I posted here started, in some cases, as a spark from a Digg submission, further developed through my personal research. This is the reason why I am writing here about it. News on Digg were frequent [...]

Eight molecules that changed the rules of the game: Bakelite

Stefano Borini — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 11:00:43 +0000

Rule changed: it started the world of plastic we live in When it comes to materials for making tools, housing, chariots, and dishes, humanity had only one choice for many thousands of years: use what nature provided. Clay, rocks, metals, resins, rubber, and wood were the most common materials directly available for harvesting. As primitive [...]

New StackExchange proposal: Academia

Stefano Borini — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 08:39:19 +0000

I just created a new proposal at Area51: Academia. The aim of such Question/Answers site, when opened, is to provide assistance to academics of any level and discipline, with particular focus towards academic life, grants, papers and posters, conferences, career, management, research group directions, and academic services. You can subscribe to the proposal by following this [...]

Google stops Wave development

Stefano Borini — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 06:54:01 +0000

Google decided to interrupt further development of Wave. The service itself remains active, though. I appear not to be good at predictions: a year ago, I expected Wave to take over email definitely. To be fair, a condition I added was for the server to be made public for third parties, something that never happened [...]

Hacking your brain for fun

Stefano Borini — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 23:30:16 +0000

I just came back from Nolan’s latest creation, Inception, and I was completely blown away. The core of the very elaborate plot is the concept of dreaming and consciousness levels inside dreams, in particular taking advantage of the science-fiction concept of “shared dreams”. Not unlike in The Matrix, questions about “what is real, what is [...]

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 [...]