Cold Fusion

There has been a lot of talking on the internet about cold fusion in the past six weeks. Once I read about for the first time this year, I has a lot of negative preconceptions about cold fusion. I don't even know where they come from, as they are really old prejudices. Thanks to slashdot though, I became curios. It is now enough to look for cold fusion on Google News to understand what all the fuss is about. Apparently, by the end of the year a new technology to produce energy will enter the market in direct competition with oil and renewable energies. With the simple difference that this is going to be like the democratization of nuclear power.

How can this be and nobody is talking about it? I think an analogy to VoIP technology is good for understanding. VoIP technology has been a reality for maybe more than 10 years. If used correctly, nobody would consider reasonable paying for phone calls at the moment. And yet, most people still do pay or they use a technology called Skype which in my opinion is a step back. I have been using VoIP for over three years now. It looks like a phone, it works like a phone, and yet is as cheap as it can get, i.e., I call regularly over sea and I pay nothing. All the benefits and no compromises.

I believe cold fusion is the same. It is a technology with little market. I believe that the two inventors and their investor, even with their patents, will not make in twenty years what a single oil company makes in a year. Nobody in the business of energy is going to be happy about this. It will be catastrophic, as soon nobody will want to pay for energy. And yet, most people don't want to believe it. Just try to mention the subject at dinner with your friends. How does that make sense? What makes these news about cold fusion legit? I don't have an answer to that question, but I urge people to read about cold fusion on the internet. There is not much scientific evidence against cold fusion, mostly just a lack of economical interest. I find that hardly surprising.

I have been reading the book "Fire from Ice" from Eugene Mallove about the beginning of cold fusion. The picture in the book points to a view of a great lack of understanding of the physics behind cold fusion, which seems to be still present at the moment, together with some clear evidence of it being a scientific reality. Nevertheless, it seems that funding choices were made thirty years ago by few people mainly driven by opinions rather than by scientific facts. I don't find it surprising, as in academia, where fact matters, a lot of decisions are driven by opinions that too often are hard to change even in front of evidence. I do believe that the cold fusion misconception is mainly a direct descendant of the opinion that grew up for forty years before, that fusion was a process only achievable in the way stars achieve it. But nobody ever said that it has to be so.

I believe that big changes in the world lie ahead. I believe that cold fusion is real because this is the most parsimonious explanation of what I read. And I am really curios to see what is going to happen, as this technology is for sure going to upset quite a few people. Carlo Rubbia, Italian nobel prize in physics, said that if cold fusion was real, then God has been really nice with us. Cold fusion is supposedly going to be clean, scalable, and virtually unlimited. Sounds to good to be true. And yet, why not?

When a molecule of methane mixes with two molecules of oxygen, approximately 9eV of energy are released, but when a Nickel atom fuses with a few hydrogen atoms, it releases approximately 35MeV of energy. More than six orders of magnitude of difference. Like applying Moore's law for more than 30 years. We grow believing that energy is something that comes at a high cost, economically and environmentally. But there is no law that says this has to be the case. Let's go beyond the opinions and be ready to believe again.

The price of short term views

This Christmas I have been hearing about a lot of new devices from Google. With Google TV, Google Nexus S, and Google Chrome OS, it feels like a flood. I could not deprive myself from all of them, and I am now a happy owner of a Google TV. Despite my satisfaction, I do have to say that Google TV has a lot of flaws which have no excuse.

During the first half of the year I have been amused by the diatribe between Apple and Adobe over the Flash technology. Long story short, Apple concluded that Flash over Mac sucks, and as such, they decided to single it out from their technologies. As I despise both companies, I could not care less. I cannot blame Apple's choice though. As a faithful Linux user for the last ten years, I hate Flash more than any other technology ever invented, as on Linux Flash sucks even more and the internet ecosystem it promoted makes often things inefficient on Linux.

Recently I kept reading comparisons between Google products and Apple products praising Google choice to use Flash over their platforms. Again, as much as I hate Flash, I think you should always have the right to make your life miserable by installing it. Myself I do install Flash, but I always block it with the appropriate plugin and use it only when strictly necessary. Unfortunately, on Google TV you don't have the option to block it.

Google itself praises Google TV for being Flash enabled, but apparently they are oblivious to the obvious. That is, the thing that sucks the most on Google TV, is Flash. Adobe has been promising to people, and probably to Google as well, a Linux version of Flash (Google TV, Google Nexus S, and Google Chrome OS all run on Linux) but they have been unable to deliver. With Google Chrome OS the hypocrisy seems to reach a new height now. Adobe praises the product as a new opportunity for developers to deliver their Flash applications to customers, but at the same time reports tell that performances of Flash on Chrome OS make it "sluggish and often unusable for video".

Adobe had the last ten years to switch to a software development of Flash more platform agnostic and they have clearly failed to do so. Their short terms views have finally proved to not pay off and I am glad Adobe will pay the consequences. As much as I despise Apple and their control policies, I admire Steve Jobs for having had the guts to stop the hypocrisy, and say it out loud: Flash sucks, and evidence proves this is not going to change.

The tide has turned. Flash does not deserve a second chance. Internet will eventually get rid of Flash. We might as well lead the change and turn it off now.

Goodbye Kathryn

We live in a society where our friends come and go. Maybe it was not always like it is now, or at least, not to the same extent. We move to a new place, maybe for a few months, or a few years, we get acquainted with the neighbors, we make friends, we get, we give. But then comes the time to leave and say goodbye and start it all over again. We have email and social networking sites. We have the potential to contact whoever we want around the world with the click of a mouse but only the time for a few. We can travel anywhere we wish and visit those that are far, but we have the practical means only to reach a few places in our lifetime. But sometimes, people go far away, where we cannot reach them anymore. Goodbye Kathryn. I wish I called you when I still had the chance. You are still in my memories, and you will always be.

Mobile phone networks greediness

If there is something I hate more than Microsoft and Apple, it is mobile phone networks. I am not surprised anymore by what they come up with. Let's start with some background. Since I had a phone, and now it is getting close to 10 years, I have always been used to paying for sending short text messages. Maybe during the last decade it made a little bit of sense. After all, there is an infrastructure to pay. If I remember correctly, the price was about 15c per SMS. Now, in the United States, the price is about 20c to send and 20c to receive, so overall 40c. At the same time, you can buy data plans which allow you to download MB of data on your phone for a reasonable price. How does that make sense?

There is more. For how long have you been able to call internationally for as little as 2c per minute all over the civilized world? It must have been at least ten years. Still, ATT would charge me more than a dollar per minute if I dare calling internationally to Italy from my phone and they sell a special package which lowers the price to 9c per minute. It is like going to a diner and being told that the eggs are salmonella free, you are just going to have a mild diarrhea. Why is that?

Now I read that Verizon has put a special button on their phones which is very easy to press by mistake and which connects the internet and it would immediately charge you 2 dollars in the case you are not enrolled in a flat data plan. According to a Verizon employee this was not an accident. Yes Verizon, I already hate you for promoting phones without SIM cards, which give the power to the customer to choose the operator they prefer. Now you lost any chance of forgiveness.

While all of this is happening, Google is introducing a new service, Google Voice, which allows you to send SMSs for free, call in the United States for free, call internationally for 2c, and much more. I can clearly see where this is going. What would be optimal is that the only bill you have to pay is the one to access the internet, either at home, or through the mobile network, and then what you do with it should be your own business, be that sending an SMS, sending an email, making an international call or whatever. All these stupid rules about paying for things which don't reflect how much you use the network is just hindering technological advancement. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to pay less for cellphone, after all the service they provide is quite useful to me and worth it the $45 a month I spend for it, but I am tired of all the technical issues I have to deal with. For example, to call in Italy I have to call my Google Voice number, dial my PIN, dial 011 and then the number which I have to remember by heart since I cannot call from the phonebook at that point. Isn't this retarded? Well, yes.

I think someone at Google is even more angry than I am and is actually doing something about it. I can just praise the effort and hope that this nonsense will come to an end soon. Exploiting people stupidity and inability to get organized should be unlawful, like gambling, but this seems exactly what mobile phone companies have been doing. Why is it that I cannot use the internet to answer my calls when I am at home? If phone companies really want to minimize the usage of their network, why don't they make it easy to switch to a different network for people using their service? Because then they have no explanation for charging you. Well, this is very counterproductive for both customers and carriers. Guess what though, with Google Voice you can do that.

You don't need to read this to understand that different services with conflict of interest should not being in the hands of the same company. Do you think it would make sense for a Tobacco company to own the business of nicotine patches? Well, in the same way I think it makes no sense for companies selling the ability to connect to a network to try to control what phone you use to connect to it and in which way you access it. These three things should be decoupled. There is no doubt this will happen in the end, but looking back, if we put some laws, we would have realized that this would have just happened faster and sooner.

Saved by the GPS

On Sunday I went to the U2 concert in Boston with some friends. The event took place at the Gillette Stadium, located South of Boston and capable of hosting more than 68000 people. Most of the stadium was filled, and that, together with the poorly designed exit routes, made coming out of the concert a nightmare.

If I knew that before I would have thought twice about parking at the Stadium. I was kind of startled that for a stadium which costed $325 million they did not even build underground tunnels so that the crowd would not have to cross the road to get to the parking lot. I had to wait more than two hours in the parking lot before the line even started moving. I could not believe I had to pay $40 only for parking. This again, goes along the well practiced way to do business, once they get you to pay, there is no more incentive for a good service.

That said, there was a bright side in the story. Once out of the parking lot, I had in front of me a four lanes line of cars. The idea to be stuck there was as startling as the two hours waiting in the parking lot. While in line, I checked on the GPS program I bought for my phone for $35 and I noticed that there was a little road, S Walpole St, heading back south and joining the highway a couple of miles away. Moved by desperation and a sense of "if I don't try I will never know", I exited the line, and in less than five minutes I was driving 80 miles an hour on I-95, in the complete darkness of the night, since street lamps are not common in American highways. I was amazed, but the best part of it was when I-95 crossed the road where the line was. Around 2am I could see all the cars stuck on top of the flyover. The view was just beautiful.

As I would say in Italian, "un mondo di pecore!"

Chromosome 17

I wished there was a book with fun facts about genetics. Actually, there might be. I have not even looked out of laziness. Nevertheless, this is still a good reason to talk about fun facts. Let me start from the beginning.

Since the completion of the human genome project, every once in while the Genome Reference Consortium updates what is called the human reference genome. Each one of us carries two sets of chromosomes, each made of about 3.2 billions nucleotides. Now, if you wanted to store that information, you could do so by writing down all the nucleotides. You probably know that most of the genome is the same across people, and it is mostly the same across great apes and humans. On average, one nucleotide out of 100 is different between a chimpanzee and a human being. So it is much more efficient to have a reference sequence and to store, for each one of us, the differences between our genome and a consensus reference sequence.

The consensus reference sequence was the goal of the human genome project and, even if it is mainly complete, it gets updated every now and then. In the last update, hg19, 9 regions have been marked as special, because they have what is called an alternate assembly. What happened is that, for different reasons, nine long sequences have diverged so much that they have irrevocably parted and cannot recombine with each other anymore. So, the reference genome takes into account the possibility, at this nine loci, for these alternative sequences.

One of these caught my interest today. It is a two million nucleotides long sequence on chromosome 17. It is thought that at some point, around two million years ago, an inversion event took place, that is, these two million base pairs got inverted in direction. This does not affect the functionality of the sequence, since the cells have no predilection for sequence direction. Although, it affects the ability of the sequence to recombine with the version with the inverted version. Among the genes in this sequence, the most famous is MAPT. It is known that mutations at this gene are responsible for some neurological disorders.

The interesting part of the story is that the inverted version of the sequence is present only in Europeans, with a prevalence between 20% and 30%. It is not clear why and some hypothesize that it might be the legacy of the Neanderthal people, who, before extinguishing, managed to interbreed with homo sapiens. That would explain why the two versions of the sequence are so different from each other and have a coalescence time, that is, an expected age from their most recent common ancestor, of about two million years.

Some of you might already understand why this is a touchy subject. It has all the ingredients for racial discrimination. The sequence is known to influence the brain, in some unknown way, and one version of it is present only among Europeans. I do not want to debate this aspect, although I expect that eventually scientist will perform the due experiments to unveil any possible hypothesis. In the meanwhile, be assured that the Neanderthal project will indeed unveil if the alternative sequence on chromosome 17 was contributed by Neanderthal people or not. Even if it is not, though, it will not rule out that it was instead contributed by home Erectus in Asia or some other unknown extinguished hominid for which no fossils are known.

In the meanwhile, I had to know, as a European, what do I have? It turns out that with 23andme you can check, if you look at the right SNP. In particular SNP rs1864325 is a predictor for the two sequences. A C at the SNP corresponds to the typical African haplotype, while a T at the SNP corresponds to the mysterious European haplotype. It turns out that I have a C and a T. So, whatever it means, I know that I have one of each sequences in my pair of chromosomes 17.

In a more romantic way, I can say to be one of those many million of Europeans within which the two sequences, after million of years of separation, have come together to shape me. Whatever that means. But I am confident I will not have to wait long to know.

Coming back to Boston

I have finally moved, about one week ago, to my new place in Cambridge. I like it a lot, there is a big kitchen and a nice living room and I have half bathroom all for myself. Overall, it is quite a treat. There are two very sweet cats which periodically come to me asking to be scratched on the neck.

After spending the week in Montreal and Hanover, I drove back today at night, listening to radio Kiss 108. This was the first time I drove back to my new place. Driving through the city and parking right in front of my place was relaxing and stress free. Not even two months have gone by, but I think I have already adjusted.

Collecting trash

Since I moved into Boston I started to see homeless people and beggars almost everywhere. Clearly this is the place to be in if you are desperate. Thanks god a situation I am far from, for now. But not so much to not persuade me to get interested on a couch I saw on the street.

Thursday is the day the trash gets collected at night in Cambridge. People put out their bins, their recycling boxes and the furniture they don't want anymore. Someone put out a nice couch and I could not help being attracted to it. The feel of shame was overwhelming. Who would ever go and pick up a couch abandoned on the street ready to be picked up by the trash master?

I have lived in my new home for about a month and I have left about a month in the same place. In September I will move to a nicer place which I already like a lot. People are friendly and clean there and the location is ideal to go to work by bus. But where I am now, people are dirty and careless about the house. The couch is broken and the house overall is left to rot. I cleaned the other day and I ended up thinking that the main reason the people living in this place sublet the house in the summer is that so they get some cleaning once a year. No kidding. Well, also, the subletters from last summer must have not done a god job.

So, I thought, what makes me really think that the couch in my house is worse than the one in the street? Pretty much nothing. That said, I went and picked the couch off the street with the help of a friend. This should make the living room bearable for the month of August, until I finally leave this place. I can just hope that now I will not start looking for food in the trash bin, with the excuse that it will be only until the end of August. Gulp!

Conference in Trieste

After returning to my homeland, I spent my first weekend in Trieste, attending a conference about genetic isolates. I had no expectations of any kind, but I had to present a poster and give a short talk, which is always a nice experience. It turned out I had an even better time than I expected, despite the fact that it rained the all time.

The second day I met Augustine Kong, t, he head statistician from deCODE, after he gave a very inspiring talk. The company deCODE is a research company based in Reykjavik, Iceland. It was founded in 1997 by Kari Stefansson, an Icelandic researcher working at Harvard at the time. Stefansson at the time wanted to study, through genetic and pedigree data of all people from Iceland, that is, about 320000 people, all the genetic causes of the diseases affecting the people in Iceland. More than ten years ago he had a big dream and you can still say, nowadays, that the Icelandic genetic diseases are the ones we know the most about compared to any other genetic disease around the world.

I have known about deCODE for about three years now, and I had read many papers from Kong, but I never met him before and I was expecting someone very secretive about his work since deCODE is, after all, a private company who raised money with the idea of selling part of the intellectual property developed to big pharmaceutical companies to make innovative drugs.

Kong gave an interesting talk, one of those talks that you can tell was already tried before in front of a different audience, maybe with some slight modifications. It did not take long to notice that he is the typical researcher very enthusiast about what he does and very eccentric. The part I liked the best was when he came down from the stage and he was given a microphone to answer a question. He kept the microphone all the time at the level of his waist while he was answering. After the talk I went to talk to him and I discovered this to be no easy feat. He is extremely loquacious, and if you ask him a question he would find his way out of the answer and keep talking about something else for about fifteen minutes. Although he mainly said very interesting things. Then, at the end of the day, I had the lucky chance, together with another Italian student, to sit at the table with him and after a couple of glasses of wine he started to share everything with us.

How do you decide to raise tens of million of dollars and fund a large company? Back in 1996 Kari Stefansson, the CEO of deCODE, applied for NIH grants to study genetic diseases in Iceland using STRs, the current technology for those kind of studies back in the day. His motivation was that Iceland is the perfect location for such a study since they kept perfect pedigree information up to the seventeenth century. Although his project was extremely ambitious and the grant was rejected. People with big egos do not take rejections that easily and he decided to take a different route by raising private money.

When he approached Augustine Kong, he asked him to join the scientific team on the soon to be found company and he told him that there were good chances he could have become a millionaire although the goal was to embrace this adventure for the sake of research. According to Kong, Stefansson is not the easiest person to deal with. Maybe you heard this before, but be prepared when you put yourself between a determined man and what he is after. For the project to work, special laws had to be set in Iceland to protect the privacy of the people who gave their DNA to the company. In exchange, Stefansson promised his country a business which was going to bring a lot of wealth and jobs to the country.

More than ten years later a lot has happened. The global economic recession hit Iceland worse than everywhere else in the world. All the private banks bankrupted and they were nationalized. The Icelandic currency lost more than half of its value on the market. I happen to know a young Icelandic girl who works as an au-pair in the United States and he considered staying longer in the States as a result. Even before that happened, deCODE went almost bankrupt itself and its market value is close to nothing. Kong told us that the company made it through the recession but it has more than 200 million dollars of debts and it is unclear if it will make it during the next three years. Although, since he is paid in United States dollars, he also told us that now life for him is way cheaper.

Kong did not seem to care much about this. He really seems to be driven by the research and the fame that comes from being able to do it in a place unique in the world for it. He seems like the typical workaholic person, around 50 years old, with a plethora of papers published in Nature Genetics and Science during the past ten years. According to him he would not mind retiring from this intense job in the next three years. While in Iceland though, he lost his American green card, as it happens if you don't spend enough time in the country, and he seemed a bit worried about it. In any case, even if the company disappears, they are thinking about applying for grants to keep the research team able to analyze the data that they have collected.

During the dinner I also had some interesting scientific discussions with Kong. My research related to his work, so it was quite a lucky chance. Kong is interested in recombination events, that is, those rare events that recombine homologous chromosomes during meiosis. Without those, eggs and sperm would not be generated correctly. Recombination allows DNA to be shuffled so that favorable mutations that arose in one individual can eventually spread to the whole population and combine with other favorable mutations from other individuals. This in turn, has allowed evolution to work at a much higher pace and allow the complexity of multicellular organisms and ultimately of human people.

Not much is known about statistics of recombination events in human people. First of all these events take place only during meiosis. Second, experiments to study them are very expensive, even if recently some people managed to study recombination events in sperm. The problem is that given a person with his child, it is not possible with current technology to study which meiosis took place in the parent to generate the child. Although, the genotype information that can be analyzed nowadays can be integrated across relatives to unveil the locations of the meiosis and the database created in Iceland is the perfect place to perform this integration.

Human recombination events are a very fascinating subject and most of their mysteries will be unraveled in the next coming years. Recombination, together with random mutation, is the magic underlying force which shapes DNA of species, that allows them to evolve and adapt on the long term. If you believe that there is an invisible force shaping the events of the universe by playing with dice, then recombination is one of its dice. It is known that it happens in very specific places of the DNA, although it seems that where these places are located in the chromosomes might be person dependent to a certain degree. Females have more than males, but there is high variability in how many a person has on average across different people. It is necessary for correct segregation of chromosomes and, as you grow older, you need to have more to yield a fully working egg, which could be an explanation of why some women fail to have children after a certain age. Basically if they already have few to begin with, then these would not be enough later in life.

Nothing is known about why some people have more and some people have less, but, since it is known that it is inheritable, there are likely genetic variations for it. Where are they? My assumption is that, if Kong did not tell us and he does not know yet, then nobody does, since you need a very large dataset of relatives to carry such a statistical study and deCODE is the only place in the world where you could do that. Maybe unveiling the biology of the process might help people having kids even later in life. Or maybe knowing who in advance can and who cannot might make people take different decisions in life. Although, these are just speculations.

Are you feeling the excitement? Well, I did. Five years from now what is now a mystery might be in textbooks. It is not the knowledge per se which gives the thrills, but the process of the discovery. Knowing to be the first one to get there is what gives the excitement. As Kong said, winning the competition is his main drive, not the fact that he is doing something good for humanity and I actually respect that. Because I am bit skeptical about what is good and bad for people and I believe that research should be done, when possible, just for fun.

Goodbye books

I can start counting the days I have left at Dartmouth if I put together my fingers and my toes. This also means that I am about to move all of my belongings, the light ones and, alas, the heavy ones as well. This brings the blame on our best friends, the books.

Books are nice, but they are extremely heavy, especially when they come in large numbers. Furthermore, in five years at Dartmouth I collected a lot of books, some of which I probably should have never bought. Those that know me well might also know that I am not a fan of collecting and that holds true even for books, with some exceptions. Those books over which you really studied hard will always be a very good reference and you might not want to give them away.

Although there are a lot of books which you might have read once and you will probably never read again, for which it is usually just a good idea to borrow them from the library and return them, and there are a lot of books which you might just have not liked them at all. So well, a lot of books weigh more than half of my laptop. What is the best option for them? Thanks god, there are better options than throwing them away.

I finally decided to start selling them on Amazon. The process is amazingly fast and efficient. In a couple of hours I managed to post about thirty books. Now I don't know how many of these will get sold, but in the early afternoon I already sold my first one. Hopefully it is not just luck and tomorrow I will be celebrating again.

I just need to avoid being caught by the frenzy or I will start selling all the books I see around me. The fact, I believe, is that books, like tapes and cds, might eventually become something from the past. A lot of people will tell you the opposite but I think they are wrong. The technology is just not there yet, but, when it will, reading books on paper might feel ridiculous. Anyway, as long as people don't get that, it will be easy to sell. So take your chance now.

I hoped there was something similar to Amazon in Italy, my family has collected all sort of useless medias during the past three decades. When I go home I should start the frenzy again.

Human people have an irresistible instinct at collecting stuff. This probably goes back to when people used to live as hunter gatherers, in which case if you lose your woolly piece of clothes or the spear that your grandfather passed to you, then chances are that you are going to starve to death while freezing your ass. But be aware of what you collect. Cds and dvds will not last longer than thirty years, your electronic gadgets will soon be outdated and your books will eventually be yellow like the cover, if they are Springer books. My sole piece of advice is: if you don't use, you don't need it.

Carpe diem!

Fantaboulous skydiving

Last weekend was probably, by many measures, the craziest weekend of my life. Together with a bunch of good friends I went to this small place in Maine for rafting and a few minutes of pure adrenaline by skydiving from a small plane.

Overall there was a lot of pain involved. By camping in the cold, being sleep deprived, getting completely wet in the river while the sun is hiding behind the clouds, and being repeatedly bitten in the face by flocks of mosquitoes so dense that they could cover the sun.

But the grand finale with the jumping from the plane made up for most of it. If I had to summarize the whole experience with one sentence I would definitely go for the following one: There is nothing to fear but fear itself. In fact, skydiving is a pretty safe activity. Definitely safer than rafting and by many order of magnitudes safer than riding a car with a 19 year old girl driving around 108 miles an hour, as it happened on the way to Maine.

But the really cool part about skydiving is facing your own irrational fears. I had never ridden a small plane, and yesterday I was in this little box, with no space for seats, with barely space for five people, about 3500 meters up in the air standing on a small metal plate inside a big vacuum just full of air.

You can think about it a lot, but being there will give a feeling that it is difficult to describe. Put that together with the fact that you don't know what it is going to feel like. You just know that it will feel like nothing you have experienced before.

That's exactly what I felt. As my tandem instructor put it, it was fantaboulous. I confess I was pretty tense, although not more than I would feel if I had to jump from a 20 meters cliff, or climb a 20 meters cliff. Apparently skydiving has little to do with being afraid of heights. To some extent, I would say it was even less scary because everything will keep telling you that it is safe. Truth is, there is a cap on how scary something is going to be if you rationally believe that it is safe. Emotionwise it will never equal the experience of meeting a hungry polar bear in the middle of an ice pak.

The thing I was scared the most was actually to be scared. Since I bought the video, I thought that I was going to remember everything that I did, so I better did it right. I concentrated a lot about how I was going to behave and maybe it turned out that doing so helped me concentrating on something other than my fears. I don't have the video yet, but I got a feeling that it is going to be pretty funny and kinf of stupid.

But what the hell, as soon as I get it I am going to put it on my phone, so that I will keep it with me all the time. I am so glad I did it. It was worth it every single cent.

Nikitas and Friede's party

Tonight I went to the birthday party of two very close friends. There were many good friends there. I had a really good time, although I cannot the sense of gloominess that comes from the fact that in less than a month I will be leaving Dartmouth for good. Five years living in the same place are quite a lot, and even if I changed friends and company many times during these five years, I feel now even more nostalgic.
Most of the friends at this party are people from Europe that will at some point go back home, whatever home means for them. I am leaving but I am not going home or getting closer for what matters.
I felt really touched by all those that told me that they are going to miss me. They were mainly drunk, I think they really meant it. I ended up DJing after midnight, first with some salsa and then with some awesome songs that we loved and shared. It felt so good, it really seemed that we were celebrating all the time we spent together with the songs that touched us the most.
Friede got a photoalbum for her birthday. It was incredibly nice. Months and months of experiences collected in a single book, and I am in many of them as well. It is scary. People never used to take so many pictures.
Well, this post is a bit of a mess, but that's how I feel now, despite the fact that I have not drunk at all. I feel a lot of gloominess. There were too many nice things happening tonight to believe that it will all be just part of the past soon.
But, as the movies Benjamin Button points out, how would we know how special the people we care about are if they were never to leave us?

Cully's run

It does not happen very often, for me, to participate in a 5K run organized for someone that committed suicide which I actually knew at some point in my life. More in general, it does not happen to me to participate in a 5K run at all.
The day was cloudy and windy, as the typical days in spring and summer in New Hampshire. You could feel the chills on your bare legs and the humidity from the grass and the mud. I did not know very well Cully, the person which the 5K was organized for. But I felt touched by the attempt her Rugby team put on the remember her. There were plenty of pictures of her and a long letter describing what person she was like and quoting things that she said. Everything was aimed at describing what a nice and caring person she was.
It seems like after you are dead you suddenly become a wonderful person. It made me wonder what people will remember about me when I will be gone. I do not like the idea to be remembered just for the good things I have done. I would rather have a completely sincere version of me.

Samsung NC20

I know it is kind of lame to make a post about a laptop, but I cannot help. The geek inside me is screaming. Well, as you might have guessed, I bought a new laptop this week. Last weekend I googled "netbook 12", looking for an affordable light laptop. All of us have seen this little laptop called netbooks and got fascinated to some degree. I have been disgusted though. What is the use of a computer with the keyboard of a large cellphone. None in my opinion.
But I do like the idea of a light laptop, without the useless cd drive, which I can bring everywhere, with my thumb, my index finger, and my middle finger. Well, the NC20 is exactly what I was asking for. For a mere $550 you get an awesome 12 inches laptop, weighing 1.5kg. If it was oval, you could use it like a frisbee. Resolution is cool, 1280x800, hard drive is awesome, 160GB. You can read the specs online, it has everything you need.
On a side note, why they did not invent it before? The answer is awesome. Intel forbade hardware manufacturers from putting their processors in netbooks larger than 10 inches, to avoid competing with the more lucrative notebook market. So VIA came out with this new platform, Nano, which is targeted at ultramobile devices. Basically all of my laptop, other than few pieces, is made in Taiwan.
The keyboard feels awesome, you can type really fast, and the screen also looks great, and the system is so silent, you cannot tell the hard drive is working or the fan is spinning. Compared to my 5kg old laptop this looks like a feather blown by the wind.
Here is my geeky post, if you are planning to buy a laptop consider the NC20. You will be able to sit by someone with the Macbook Air and say, "Oh, cool like mine, just three times as expensive". Only problem, not everything works with Linux, which bothers me but it seems like it might get fixed. I can still hook it up at a conference and give a presentation with it. That is good enough with me.
Oh, I forgot to say, the battery lasts 6 hours. I always thought of the battery as that awesome piece of metal that allows you to move from one room to another without having to reboot. Well, it is time for a change. I am on my way to see if I can get some work done with matlab while getting some tan. Bu-ya-ka-sha!

Making a movie

Last weekend I finally got together a couple of friends and shot a movie that I had in mind for a couple of weeks. What an amazing experience. It was very interesting. When you try to make a movie you start realizing all the little problems that you can bump into and that can make something that you would think as very easy to do as a titanic project. But it went well. The audio was kind of bad, but we all had a lot of fun acting and two of us ended up jumping in the lake, which was freezing cold.
I have had some experience with editing movie clips, but I had never tried to put together a short movie before. I have indeed acted before and I knew that it is a very tiring process, that you have to repeat many times the scenes over and over again. But it was a completely different experience to have to tell other people what to do. When directing a movie you need to be conscious of the other people needs as well as your needs to get the scenes well done, which can take many tries. It is a hard balance to keep.
Then, once the shots have been taken, I brought everything to my lab. It took at least eight hours of work to edit all the scenes together, and to think as well how to put them together. It is a sad process, since you also have to decide what to keep out, even if you liked and you know that everybody else put efforts in acting it. The movie ended up being kind of long, about nine minutes. I thought it would have been about three. That tells already how unexperienced I am.
Overall, the experience was a blast. If you have the time and the skills, I suggest to save a weekend to do it. It pays off a lot, and watching it a long time from now will bring back a lot of good memories. On the side, I developed a kind of tick now. Everytime I see a movie I am now always looking at where the hands are and when the angle changes, you will always find out that their position moved a little bit. After you try to edit a scene with multiple angles, you cannot stop thinking about it.
Final remarks, what is the movie about? Well, I do not want to give the details away. If you are curios, then you need to ask me.

Languages around the world

Yesterday evening I ended up entertaining conversation with a Turkish girl at dinner. Turkey is such a close country to Europe. More than a decade ago I went to Skopelos, in the Aegean sea, not too far from it, and maybe I will eventually go sailing with my uncle to Rhodes, which is very close to the Western coast of Turkey.
Despite little desire to learn Turkish, I am always fascinated by how different languages are and how we bear the irreversible imprinting of it. So I started asking all possible questions about names for different objects and concepts trying to catch any similarities with the languages I know. Despite the long list I had little luck, the only thing that came out was "kim" which is the Italian equivalent for "chi" and "baba" that is the equivalent for dad and which can be said in Italian as "babbo". Not much overall.
What I had forgot was that Turkish is not an Indo-European language. Despite the fact that Turkey is closer than India, it would be easier to find similarities with Indian languages. I did not investigate the grammar myself but I read that it is very different. Turkish is part of the bigger superfamily of Altaic languages which do not use articles or gender or even pronouns, if I remember correctly.
I have been studying a little bit of German and I got fascinated by how much the echo of an ancestral grammar lives in Italic languages like Italian and Spanish as it does in German. I can understand how dialects come to life. Each one of us, looking at his own past, might find istances of inventing a new word to describe something special to be recognized only by a small circle of friends. But grammar structures go way beyond what anybody might have tried to come up to change how we comunicate with each other. Who was responsible for genders in Germanic and Italic languages? For sure, for such a change to take place, the logical explanation would be that there was a time that language was spoken by a really small circle of people. Those choices of change, whoever made them, have an everlasting echo across the whole Europe now, and, through English, across the whole world.
Nevertheless, even the Turkish language has the familiar Subject Object Verb order as German and Latin do. Most of languages seem to share this characteristic around the world and I easily believe that this might have to do with something hard encoded in our brain. So, how much is language innate and how much is it acquired after birth? A lot of people asked this question and the answer is such an amazing mystery. It is a fact that in the past ancestral humans could not spoke and at some point something changes, maybe something dramatic. But we have to remember that everything that happened must have taken place step by step. In this regard, I find in these words from the book "Before the dawn" fascinating:
"... the human capacity for syntax might have evolved out of animal brain module designed for some other purpose, such as navigation. Their argument is that the essential feature of language is recursion, the ability to embed one phrase inside another in an indefinitely long chain. Recursion may also be a feature of faculties like navigation that require an animal to remember how to get from A to D, with and excursion to B and C if the way is blocked. If the genes that specify the brain's navigation module were accidentally duplicated, the spare set would be free to evolve and perhaps acquire the function of encoding thought into language."
We might know much more about it in the next decade. Just recently, the Neanderthal genome project proved that Neanderthals had the same copy of gene FOXP2 as humans do, which is believed to have had a big part in the development of language. Even if this is not proof that the Neanderthal could talk, finding a different copy would have indeed proved the contrary, as many people believe.
Little doubt there is that language is one of the key defining feature of the human species. Languages, in their diversity, carry the choices that people like us took thousands of years ago. Choices that echo still now, everytime we entertain conversation with someone.

And what if he gets hit by a bus?

This week I have been at the Joint Mathematics Meetings, the biggest conference for mathematicians taking place yearly in the United States. I have not been terribly impressed but it was an interesting experience overall.
I took a minicourse teaching how to use a computer software named GeoGebra. It is a program that allows to play with Euclidean geometry very intuitively. It is one of those tools that you wished you had back in high school. Still, I thought it would be interesting to learn how to use it in case I ever have to teach something to younger kids. And, it is completely open source, a plus.
Later on, I went to the exhibits and in one of the many stands there was a girl presenting SketchPad, a software that is terribly similar to GeoGebra but is proprietary and comes with a price. I could not be easily impressed.
Although I decided to engage conversation with the presenter starting saying that GeoGebra looked extremely similar to their software. As I said that, I could see the gloom in her eyes. She did confess me later on that people in their company were very worried about it since SketchPad was their main asset. And once a free and open source version is out, who would buy it?
Definitely not me, since SketchPad does not even run on Linux. Still, I was touched by the story. The people at SketchPad are not against open source, it is just that they do not have a business model for it.
Moreover, I learnt that there was a single designer for SketchPad and that actually, everybody in the company, ten people more or less, was very dependent on the work of this person. The girl confessed me that sometimes she wanders, and what if he gets hit by a bus?
That brought me to something that few people think about when using software. In general, software is very complicated. People write it, people change it. When those people leave, there is a piece of software that nobody wants to touch anymore because it takes forever only to learn how it was designed. It is very common for software engineers to rewrite it from scratch every once in a while. It seems like an inevitable doom. So what do you do? The only answer is: make it as modular as you can, so that when you need to rewrite a piece it is a small one. That seems like the best you can do. And open source is really good at modularizing. Maybe overall that is the very power of it. How many people understand that though?

Android, that is, the Google phone

Christmas is still three weeks away but Black Friday, the second most important shopping day in the United States, has already passed. I decided to buy myself another Christmas present, after the DNA kit. This one is more conventional, the G1 from HTC, the first cellphone using Android, the Google operating system based on Linux. For those of you that have seen an iPhone (there are about 15 millions around the world, chances are that you have), the G1 is the first serious competitor. Since the moment I have heard about Android I have been waiting to see one. Since the G1 came out on the market I had seen a lot of videos of how cool the phone is and I really felt like I wanted one. Problem was that it was only sold locked to the T-mobile network that works only in big cities, and Dartmouth is way far from big cities. But recently some people have figured it out how to unlock it and after spending half afternoon reading on forums about people successfully unlocking it and playing around with it I decided to take my chance too.
I got a used one on eBay yesterday and I bought right away an unlocking code and this morning I got a friend SIM to perform the activation, since without it the phone is little more than a brick. Once all these technicalities have been solved I started playing. I do not even have a SIM card but the amount of Internet applications you can play with is so diversified that it is worth it the money just as a PDA. I think of it, for now, as an iPod touch with microphone and gps and a keyboard. Now, let me explain you why Android is so much better than the iPhone. It is not just because it runs Linux, although the open source philosophy has a lot to do with it.
First of all, the phone has a better processor, more memory and a keyboard which, if it might not look aesthetically beautiful when open, it does make it way more functional when browsing. This in turn gives more flexibility to the applications that you can run.
One of the features I like the best is the ability to synchronize with the Internet your contacts, your calendar and your email. This basically puts an end to having to organize your private information more than once ever again. Just one problem less to think about in your life. As the developers put it, if you lose your phone you just buy another one, login into your account, and you are ready to go with no further configuration.
The applications you can install are absolutely innovative. The most surprising is the barcode scanner. You can scan anything with a barcode and in a few seconds you are redirected to a website with a list of online shops with prices for that product. Basically the best deal is now always two clicks away. Merchants will have to deal with this at some point because customers are about to get a lot smarter. Another very cool application is the one that recognizes the name of a song after listening to it for a few seconds. It is not fail proof but it works fairly well. This one exists also on the iPhone actually, as it should be. Applications should not be tied to a given operating system. Another great application to show off the features of the G1 is the one to look at the stars in the sky. Using the accelerometer and the compass built in the phone, it is enough to point it to the sky and the correct region of the sky is displayed on the screen. So easy that I almost cry at all the time spent trying to recognize the stars in the sky equipped with different maps and books. Now it is just about to become much easier.
Overall the idea of the phone is simple. Making the information on the Internet as easily accessible as possible. To this extent, probably the best application is the browser. There is not much to say about it. It works great, as much as the one on the iPhone, since both browser are based on Webkit. If you ever used a browser on a different phone do not get it wrong. The experience on the G1 and the iPhone is completely different and it will not make you regret too much not being in front of the computer.
Someone once said that since the beginning of the 80s little has changed in the PC world, other than the little chord that connects it to the Internet. I can see the point but this new generation of cellphones is adding something new to the PC experience. Maybe 20 years from now we will all have connections deep in our brain that will allow us to connect to the Internet straight with our thought and cellphones will seem something from the past. But, nevertheless, the G1 is about to make history and I am not missing the excitement.
I cannot way to get back home for Christmas to show it off.

My DNA

The day after Halloween, after more than five weeks waiting, the company 23andme finally returned me the results of my DNA test. I was so excited I could barely wait to see. The first impression I had was that there were so many things to look at I did not know where to start. I will start with what was the most fun.
By virtue of being a male, 23andme genotyped both my mitochondrial DNA and my Y chromosome. These two are very special pieces of DNA since they cannot go under recombination. This means that they are passed generation after generation without mixing or changing, other than for mutations. But mutations are rare so they change little even in a 1000 year span. You get the first one from your mom and the second from your dad, if you are a male.
It turned out that my mitochondrial DNA belongs to haplotype H13a1, a rare group that is mainly common around the Caspian sea. According to the history, it was brought to Southern Italy and Southern Spain during the last ice age, something like 20000 years ago. My Y chromosome belongs instead to haplogroup J2, a kind that seems to be very common in Southern Europe, Northern Africa and the Middle East. Again, according to the history, it seems to have migrated multiple times from the Fertile Crescent to Europe and in particular to Italy where it is overall pretty common.
If you are curios about your ancestry you might find this very interesting. Although it only relates to your maternal line and your paternal line. So, for example, it does not witness the fact that I am 25% Greek. Something else surely does though. If you are interested in your ancestry then this might be a first step but you might want to look at ancestry.com. It seems that this company now teamed up with 23andme. Their service works as follows: you try to give them as much information as you can about your pedigree and if you far back enough you end up connecting with the archives that they built that could go back up to the 1600. They only did this for America and Europe but they claim to have already collected more than a billion entries, together with the people that subscribe to their services. My understanding is that 23andme and ancestry.com will do for the world what the company deCODEme did for all the Icelanders. Something we probably all thought impossible 10 years ago will be something normal in an even shorter time.
It might be fun to look at this kind of information, although we do not need to know our ancestry to know how our DNA affects us. It would be enough to understand its language. The real information that determines us is in the rest of the chromosomes. There are almost 100 associations described, as I write, that can be accessed through the 23andme website. These are divided in four categories, associations that put you at a more elevated risk, associations that put you at a decreased risk, associations that put you at a typical risk, and finally associations with traits that are not considered diseases. For example I could confirm the fact that I am an heterozygous for eye color, that is, my eyes are not blue but I can have a child with blue eyes. I seem to be lactose intolerant. This does not mean that I cannot drink milk but only that my ability to digest it decreases faster as years go by. This comes as no surprise since the mutation that prevents that is common only in Northern Europeans.
I also am not a carrier for three severe recessive diseases like cystic fibrosis and others for which the genetic reason has been identified. Not that my life is going to change much because of this, at least not any soon, but it is cool to know. There are so many more things to say that I will stop with a last one. Going bald is something that is usually inherited from your mom, in the meaning that your father has little to do with it. The reason is that a variant of a gene on chromosome X, inherited only from the mom for males, prevents you from going bald (to be precise you have 11 times less chances, but this is a very strong association). It turns out that I do have that variant. This was very cool, also because it is one of the few variations for which I know who I inherited it from.
My next goal now is to convince other people to do it as well. Why is that? Because I believe that what I paid for now is only the tip of the iceberg. The more people will be genotyped the more people will know about the way genes affect people lives. This service gives you at the same time the ability to know more about yourself and help other people know more about themselves. As 23andme puts it, in the same way you help research by giving some money to participate in a race, you can also do it by giving your DNA available for research. Your single contribution will not make the difference but if many people do it, their overall contributions will.
It costs only $399 and that means that everybody in the civilized world can afford it. Now it is only a matter of making people understand why it so important. I believe that in the next 10 years it will change the way we look at what we are and, furthermore, it will give a new insight of what directed evolution to shape us the way we are. How could you not be curios about that?

Vermont Corn Maze

Yesterday I went to what is known as the Vermont Corn Maze. The name already explains much of what the place is, that is, a maze inside a field of corn. Have you ever been inside a field of corn? Starting from the summer the corn is so high that it is not much different from a wall. But what is the maze? I had no idea until I actually got inside there.
Together in a group of seven people I went to this touristic location north in Vermont. Upon arrival I entered this big field of corn with the simple belief of how hard could it be to get through a a big field of corn? It is going to be very easy even if the designer was trying to make it as hard as possible. It turned out that I was right only about one of the previous statements. You can imagine which one.
The main problem is that the simple two-dimensional structure was complicated by a couple of bridges going on top of multiple corn paths and after wondering around for a while you could actually get the feeling that no matter how hard you tried you were not going to easily succeed at going through the paths going under the bridge. And this really kept building up your frustration.
While you are inside a corn field everything looks the same. Even on top of the bridges, from where you can see the whole field, you cannot see where the paths go and about twenty meters from you every starts looking like a gigantic field of corn. The sun can help you orientate but it is still very hard to measure how far you went in one direction. I confess that after a while I gave up trying to outsmart the designer and I started to turn left at every fork. It took a long time and my brain gave up trying to build up a map but it eventually worked. I could feel it when I finally ended up under the bridge I tried to go under for so long.
When I finally came out, more than two hours after I entered, the sun was almost sunsetting. I felt defeated and when I looked at the aerial photographs I actually could feel that the designer really managed to outsmart me and all of my friends. It was a good feeling.
After sunset and a long dinner with my group, I returned to the corn field for an adventure night in the corn. A different corn field was set up for groups of people to go through at night while props dressed with horror faces would try to scare you. It was actually not so scary after all but it was so dark that you could not see the props jumping out of the crops. The design was impressive. Imagine yourself going through a narrow path inside a corn field with red candle lights scattered around and corpse like some of which were faked and some of which were real people. Moreover, you could also feel the constant screaming of people in front of you and behind you, mainly girls who seem more easily impressed. And finally the sky on top of the field was full of stars and so clear that you could see the whole milky way.
It might have not been exactly like you could imagine an horror movie but it is probably the as good as you can get experience possible. I will never look at a corn field the same way. Did you know, by the way, that corn was imported to Europe from the Americas? Yes, you probably did. But did you know that corn is that big because it was domesticated by farmers in the Mesoamerica trying to reuse only the plants yielding the most? If not, then check on the internet to see what a wild type corn looks like. If this still doesn't make you feel the magic of corn then go to the Vermont corn maze. Farmers have not run out of ideas on how to play with corn.