On leave

I’m on a ‘blog leave’… but I’ll be back with a new project.

Assassinations

List of assassinations.

Learn how to program

So you want to be a programmer ? Which programming languages should you learn ?

1. Python (wikipedia article)
2. Perl (wikipedia article)
3. Lisp (wikipedia article)
4. C/C++ (wikipedia article C)/(wikipedia article C++)
5. Java (wikipedia article)

Next I would recommend to learn Ruby (wikipedia article), and Javascript (wikipedia article). And although not really programming languages, I think it’s necessary to learn PHP (wikipedia article) and MySQL (wikipedia article) (after spending several years learning to master the 5 initial languages…).

And of course spend also some time working with a Linux distribution (wikipedia article) (go for Ubuntu or Debian).

One final word: reading books on the subject is good, practice is better.

Do you agree with this choice ?

BMWism

An overview of all the BMW designers.

H.G. Wells

Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, 21 september 1866.

(following the Google UFO mystery)

Post by email

This is a test using a blackberry to post by email on this blog.

Revolutionary Minds

An outstanding blog : Revolutionary Minds.

Bringing together emerging thought leaders of our scientific culture—people who are influencing the way we see our world, our selves, our minds, and our universe – the Revolutionary Minds Think Tank Blog is a place for lively, dynamic discussion of the most pressing issues in science today. Topics will include: the specific issues that would most benefit from being brought under the scientific lens; the problems most ripe for cross-disciplinary research; and the cross-disciplinary approaches that have succeeded. Over the next three months we will share the opinions of these thought leaders and allow them to connect with the tens of thousands of people who read ScienceBlogs daily.

Posterous

Posterous is the dead simple way to put anything online using email ! I will try this out one of these days. Having a blackberry, this looks like a very good tool to keep blogging while I’m travelling. Are you using Posterous ?

When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine

We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect.

Quote from an interesting article at Wired: The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine
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Holiday

Mostly on holiday till end August… Rock Werchter, travelling to Vienna to read in a typical Viennese café, to Venice before it disappears in the water, to Lake Garda to see some friends and to celebrate my sun’s birthday, to the French Riviera (Saint-Tropez, Antibes, Monaco, Nice,…), barbecues because we eat outside this time of the year, research for a new venture (think art, science, music), and the occasional mojito !

Update: visited also Philadelphia (hot), Miami (hot and humid), Mexico DC (not my first time here) and Bogotá (not at all what I expected).

Grotesque Alphabet in Mythological Landscapes

All letters with detailed description at the British Museum.

Via BibliOdyssey.

20 books on popular science

The 20 books most often tagged popular science on LibraryThing:

1. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
2. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
3. The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene
4. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
5. Chaos by James Gleick
6. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe… by Richard Dawkins
7. The Code Book by Simon Singh
8. Fermat’s Enigma by Simon Singh
9. Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
10. Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt
11. The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose
12. Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel
13. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
14. The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker
15. Blink: the power of thinking without thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
16. Cosmos by Carl Sagan
17. “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”; Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard P. Feynman
18. The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene
19. The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking
20. Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters by Matt Ridley

No surpises. Every book on this list is wildly popular, but I can’t help wondering if popular also means ‘read’ or rather ‘owned’…

The Thermostat Hypothesis

The Thermostat Hypothesis is that tropical clouds and thunderstorms actively regulate the temperature of the earth. This keeps the earth at a equilibrium temperature.

Several kinds of evidence are presented to establish and elucidate the Thermostat Hypothesis – historical temperature stability of the Earth, theoretical considerations, satellite photos, and a description of the equilibrium mechanism.

Interesting essay by Willis Eschenbach.

Further reading:

• The original paper about the Thermostat or Iris Hypothesis appeared in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
• Not everybody agrees with this hypothesis…, or what did you expect ?
• And another article with the pros and the cons.

Googlenomics

Secret of Googlenomics: Data-Fueled Recipe Brews Profitability. And Hal Varian is their chief economist! Loved his book Microeconomic Analysis, a very good introduction for the rigourous Microeconomic Theory by Andreu Mas-Colell.

Do you recognize this image ?

Concentrate on the four small dots in the middle of the picture for 30 – 40 secs. Then look at any smooth single coloured surface near you (wall, paper,…). You will see a circle of light developing. Now blink your eyes a couple of times and you will see an image emerging. Do you recognize the image ?

Aquis Submersus

Aquis Submersus (1919) is a painting by the German dadaist/surrealist Max Ernst.

Et in Arcadia ego

Et in Arcadia ego (also known as The Arcadian Shepherds) is a painting by the Italian Baroque artist Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (Guercino), +/- 1620.

Et in Arcadia ego (“I am in Arcadia too”) appears onto the cippus. It’s a moral reference to death. Remark also the iconography of the memento mori theme, a genre of artistic creations that vary widely from one another, but which all share the same purpose, which is to remind people of their own mortality.

Improbable research

An ongoing series from the Guardian. This week about law and the paper clip…

The Difficult Crossing

The Difficult Crossing by René Magritte, 1926.

Bulls of Bordeaux

Dibersion de España (Spanish diversion), from Los toros de Burdeos (Bulls of Bordeaux). Francisco Goya. Lithograph, 1825.