Sarko meets Dalai Lama

Yesterday Sarkozy met Dalai Lama in Gdansk. Finally, in a scenario populated by governments without balls, someone show off his stones.

No more snoring nights

Your neighbor is going to hate you, but your best bet to get rid of snoring is buying a Didgeridoo.

Didgeridoo Playing Helps Sleep Apnea

Maybe get a blister on your little finger

This is great. MTV posts every music video ever. I mean it. Really. Really really.

Hurricanes

From the pictures, the ISS seems the only sure place on above Earth.

Hurricanes, as seen from orbit - The Big Picture - Boston.com

Alignment motivational posters

First, came motivational posters, with sad middle management putting them all over the office.
Second, came Despair.com, with some kick-ass series of (un)motivational posters. (Read them, they are far more mind-tickling than your usual MP).
Finally, came the rest of the world, with fake motivational poster about almost everything. After the jump you'll find some poster modeled on roleplaying games alignements. Lovely.

Mightygodking.com » Blog Archive » From The Slushpile

Remembering eclipses

Tomorrow a total eclipse of Sun will be visible from Canada to China. I just put my story about the 1999 eclipse I saw in Salzburg as a comment on Boingboing.

I was longing for this eclipse since twenty years. I remember I was roughly nine, reading on a book the Total Eclipses agenda.

1981 Siberia, 1999 Austria.

I thought it was impractical for a 10 years old boy travel toward Siberia to see the nearest one. So I asked to my parents: "May I go in Austria during 1999?" - "Of course you can: you will be 29, and you will decide by yourself whether you should go or not."

Back then I didn't understood this anticipation, but I haven't miss my rendez-vous with the eclipse.

RIP: Randy Pausch

Goodbye, Randy.

45 ways to play Mario music

Super Mario Bros., level 1 music (main theme), played with a lot of instrument, ranging from the usual voice, piano, and guitar, to the less usual sousaphone, jaw harp, ruler, and tesla coil.

11 strings Bass
2 Guitars
Accordion
Bagpipe
Balalaika
Banjo
Bass Clarinet
Bassoon (@3'05'')
Beatboxing flute
Bells
Bottles (blowing)
Cello
Chorus
Church Organ
Clarinet
Clarinet and Flute
Clarinet Quartet
Drums and Bass
Flute
Guitar
Hand (by a manualist)
Harmonica
Horn
Jaw Harp
Marimba
Mini Bagpipe
Mouth Clapping
Oboe
Ocarina
Orchestra
Piano
RC Car and Bottles
Ruler
Saxophone
Slap Bass
Sousaphone
Throat (à la Animal House)
Tesla Coil (you HAVE to see it)
Trumpet
Tuba
Ukulele
Violin
Voice
Whistle
Xylophone

P.S.: my son's name is Mario. This fact is totally unrelated (giggle).

Inconvenient Truths: Get Ready to Rethink What It Means to Be Green

This Wired column debunks some environmentalists' myths, may be very interesting if you're concerned. If you're not yet, you will be soon, so go on and RTFA.

Here you will find my comments to the cited article (in italian, no offense intended for Patagonia Dwarf Owls).

Safari pwnz Firefox!

Or: I am so boringly safe that I can't stop crying.

Firefox have had me. At first it came as the only true alternative to IE. I loved it very much. I installed some useful extension (Forecastfox for the weather, NoScript for security, Scribefire (formerly Performancing) for blogging, and DownThemAll for pr0n): they helped me to enjoy Firefox ever more.

But FF is a memory hog, and is slow, slower than IE? Sure is slower than Safari, today also in Windows flavor, which is pretty safe, pretty usable, and - damn - is definitely fast.

What I am about to miss: FF has a great way to handle rss feed as dropdown menu that is missing in Safari. Neither you can close tabs with the middle mouse button. Nobody's perfect.  

tIpNo: unsalted rice cakes

After reading my nutella posts, a colleague of mine told me about his experience with unsalted rice cakes (well-known for the flatline effect on your taste). He suggested Nutella is good enough to give a sense even to this ailment. Actually, I learned the meaning of "eating cardboard" after the first bite of my first rice cake (w/out nutella).

Needless to say, I have to try it myself.

1. Get a pack of unsalted rice cakes

2. Get a Nutella jar. The more, the better. Here we have a family-size one.

3. Extract a cake from the pack.

4. Spread Nutella on cake. A fairly good amount, please.

5. Have it.

That's true: even the filthiest rice cake becomes very good with the reasonable amount of Nutella; and dietetically, due to the EPS structure, the rice cakes have very few calories. (Thank you, MArco!)

Divided we fall

Q: What if you need a kidney transplant but your available donors are incompatible with you?
A: You find other people with the same problem, and exchange your donor with another, until you find one suitable for you.

From the article:
Five patients had a willing donor whose kidney was incompatible with theirs, but it did match another in the group.
[...]an altruistic donor - neither a friend nor relative of any of the six patients - was found to match one of them.
[...]suddenly, there were six people who could receive an organ.

This is civilization.

BBC NEWS | Health | 'Six-way' kidney transplant first

tIpNo: Digestive

Following a suggestion posted by anonymous, I tried eventually Nutella on Digestive.

Get a Digestive pack, the first in my life (but not the least, I hope).



Hold firmly a biscuit. You will be tempted to gnaw it. I resisted the urge for scientifical sake :-)



Get Nutella. The more, the better. Here we have a family-size one.



Spread Nutella on biscuit. As you can see, I never limit myself to the stoichometric quantitative.



Yes: have it. The firm structure of the Digestive becomes brittle when hits your tongue, unleashing a Nutella tornado with a crisp cereal note. Actually I think it's one of the best way to taste Nutella. Not to mention the biscuit itself is a masterpiece. After the jump you will find the Digestive entry on Wikipedia.

Digestive biscuit - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

About surveillance

The linked article from Bruce Schneier demonstrates that sharing personal information between two people is not a fair trade, because gives the more powerful even more power on the weaker.

Someone, in Italy, is thinking about a law to avoid wiretapping: I hope this law will be equally applied to everyone. Besides, it doesn't satisfies the Ten Immutable Laws of Security, so is flawed since its birth.

Bruce Schneier's Security Matters: The Myth of the 'Transparent Society'

Censorship: what?

Read from Slashdot, through il Corriere: the Mayor of Florence sued Wikipedia about a (possible) defamation, about which I care not at all.

This allows to demonstrate once more how censorship on Internet is useless; in the worst case, attracts unwanted attention on the news you are trying to erase. Actually, the questionable phrase has been removed from the page (2008-03-01 17:31 CET), but due to the structure of Wikipedia, the old one is visible here. Or if you prefer, here is the cached Google version.

Besides, someone tagged a version of the Domenici english page on WP as "LGBT people from Italy", where LGBT is "Lesbo Gay Bisexual Transgender". The tag has been already removed.

Dogfather wallpaper

My genius friend (and former colleague) Marco sent me a wallpaper both visually awesome and funny. He granted me permission to post it here. You can download the wallpaper after the jump.

Standard:
1600 x 1200
1280 x 1024
1024 x 768
800 x 600

Widescreen:
1680 x 1050
1280 x 800

Note to self: a black-themed wallpaper stuns your coworkers and helps you keeping clean your desktop.

Senselessness from EU, part II

EU just banned patio heaters, thus expecting to diminish of a whopping 0,016 % the CO2 production, as demonstrated by numbers in the linked article.

I am waiting (breathless: otherwise I would emit CO2) for a more *substantial* measure.

EU to ban the patio heaters that ate the planet. Not. | The Register

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Commercial made real: Holy Trinit, Rome

A bunch of men launched a whopping half million balls down the stairs of Holy Trinit on Pincio Hill in Rome. See the video below:



The scenario is very similar to a TV manufacturer commercial, that became a viral video on the Net a couple of years ago: see by yourself.



Before you ask, the soundtrack is "Heartbeats" by Jose Gonzales.

The commercial involved 250,000 bouncy balls, so the half million declared by the newspaper seems a bit overrated. Is quite an effect anyway.

Senselessness from EU

While Sony BMG, after Warner, EMI and Universal, adds another nail to DRM coffin, Viviane Reading issued a report sanctioning a "transparent" DRM framework for the EU.

From my Boingboing comment:

Although as an Italian I am used to be ashamed of government, sometime I am ashamed of government as an EU citizen too.

I hope you all will act now and sign the Open Letter, as I have just done.

Please sign the Open Letter, and spread the word. Let not be ineptly shameful.

Letter to Viviane Reding, European Union commissioner for information society and media | DefectiveByDesign.org

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The most (im)probable future job yet: wanker.

Yes, not banker. Turns out the best motion source for pharmacologic nanobots is ATP-powered sperm flagellum. If this is true, given sufficient outcome from nanotechnologies, will result in a higher sperm demand for drugs prep.

You will be paid to jerk off. If you are reading this and you are at work, maybe you are already paid for that. :-)

Slashdot | Sperm Could Power Nanobots

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