Post by email
This is a test using a blackberry to post by email on this blog.
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).
Update
Pfff…we are settled again, everything is out of the boxes and I can even find everything 
One big advantage of moving is that you throw stuff away (if you didn’t use it for a year, you probably don’t need it, except for books and music). AND I also took time to organize my computers : hardware, software, sites, passwords, emails, etc. One remark: some sites are incredibly user-unfriendly when it comes to changing email addresses and/or passwords.
Move
Still here, but moving from one house to another is taking more time than I suspected… (and books are HEAVY).
We move
In April we will move to a new house in Tremelo ! Tonight I will make a ‘to-do list’, remember the milk so to speak.
The Ashley Book of Knots
The Ashley Book of Knots is an encyclopedia of knots first published in 1944 by Clifford Ashley. The culmination of over 11 years of work, it contains some 7000 illustrations and more than 3854 entries covering over 2000 different knots.
Create your t-shirt online
My sun just directed me to Spreadshirt, an online creative platform for personlised apparel.
Everyone has ideas and many of them fit on a shirt. We give those ideas the space they deserve: Spreadshirt’s customers can let their fantasies run free on over 100 different articles of clothing. They can use their own designs and texts, or use works from other designers. Whoever likes to create themselves or would like more attention for their projects can also sell with Spreadshirt – in their own free Spreadshirt shop. Companies and clubs, artists and bloggers, individuals both private and famous take advantage of this offer. There are more than 400,000 Spreadshirt shops open around the clock.
What will change everything ?
New tools equal new perceptions.
Through science we create technology and in using our new tools we recreate ourselves. But until very recently in our history, no democratic populace, no legislative body, ever indicated by choice, by vote, how this process should play out.
Nobody ever voted for printing. Nobody ever voted for electricity. Nobody ever voted for radio, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, television. Nobody ever voted for penicillin, antibiotics, the pill. Nobody ever voted for space travel, massively parallel computing, nuclear power, the personal computer, the Internet, email, cell phones, the Web, Google, cloning, sequencing the entire human genome. We are moving towards the redefinition of life, to the edge of creating life itself. While science may or may not be the only news, it is the news that stays news.
And our politicians, our governments? Always years behind, the best they can do is play catch up.
Nobel laureate James Watson, who discovered the DNA double helix, and genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter, recently were awarded Double Helix Awards from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for being the founding fathers of human genome sequencing. They are the first two human beings to have their complete genetic information decoded.
Watson noted during his acceptance speech that he doesn’t want government involved in decisions concerning how people choose to handle information about their personal genomes.
Venter is on the brink of creating the first artificial life form on Earth. He has already announced transplanting the information from one genome into another. In other words, your dog becomes your cat. He has privately alluded to important scientific progress in his lab, the result of which, if and when realized, will change everything.
“What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?” The Edge Annual Question — 2009. The answers make an interesting read as usual.
Presents
Today I need to have a haircut (according to my better half), and I’m going to buy presents (with a well prepared list !).
Christmas market
Don’t ask… I’ll be at the local Christmas market tonight. Food and drinks I guess. In big quantities. That’s fine. But the music… that’s not fine ! Does anyone actually like this Christmas music ?
Free software sticker book
This book includes a set of stickers related to free software projects. Now you may remove the Microsoft sticker from your computer (computers are not designed only for Microsoft Windows) and choose a sticker from this book with which to replace it.
Europe’s Weird Ways
Everyone knows about that annual tempting of fate known as running with the bulls in Pamplona. It’s one of those festivals that make the saner among us scratch our heads in confusion and wonder, “How was that ever a good idea?”
But just because it is Europe’s most famous oddity certainly doesn’t make the Pamplona festival an isolated case. Indeed, the more traditions and customs one comes across, the stranger the Old World starts to look.
Spiegel online has a series of stories to bring you up to date on the ins and outs of Europe’s Weird Ways ! What to think e.g. about slurping down live fish, or the flour wars of Galaxidi (‘alevromoutzouromata’ in Greek…) ?
Shopping
To buy tomorrow:
Travel in code
The next eight days…8 flights and several taxis.
BRU-MIR (Thomas Cook) – on time
MIR-BRU (TUI) – 2 hours delay
BRU-LIS (TAP)- on time but really bad food on board / 36 degrees Celsius in LIS
LIS-SID (TACV)
SID-RAI (TACV)
RAI-SID (TACV)
SID-LIS (TACV)
LIS-BRU (TAP)
Time for …
…Mojito ! No internet anymore tonight. Yes … you there … you too … turn your pc off and go party !
10 ideas that changed the course of history
10 ideas that changed the course of history according to The Observer : Plato’s Philosophy, Sun-centred (Copernican) Theory of the Universe, Cartesian Cogito, Theory of Universal Gravitation, Adam Smith’s Laissez-Faire Economics, Women’s Liberation, Marxist Analysis of Capitalism, Theory of the Unconscious, Theory of Relativity, World Wide Web.
Threesomes
Three favourites…
Three artists: Gustave Doré, Salvador Dalí, Giovanni Battista Piranesi
Three cities: Paris, Paris and Paris
Three colours: black, gray and ecru
Three countries: Belgium, Canada and France
Three fiction books: In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past (French: À la recherche du temps perdu) – Marcel Proust, The Glass Bead Game (German: Das Glasperlenspiel) – Hermann Hesse, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell – Susanna Clarke
Three flowers: ? (I don’t like flowers)
Three fruits: pineapple, pomelo, Granny Smith
Three graphic novels: Watchmen written by Alan Moore / drawn by Dave Gibbons, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware, The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman
Three movies: The Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein, 8½ by Federico Fellini, City Lights by Charlie Chaplin
Three non-fiction books: The Feynman Lectures on Physics – Richard Phillips Feynman, Philosophical Investigations (German: Philosophische Untersuchungen) – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (commonly GEB) – Douglas Hofstadter.
Three sports: swimming, badminton, tennis
Can you agree with these favourites ?
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