blinking in paris

2010-02-27T17:49:00.001+01:00

Trip to Japan 2009

2009-06-14T11:19:00.002+02:00

My latest creation

2009-01-25T11:10:00.000+01:00

De vs Du, De la, Des - French Prepositions and Articles

2008-11-20T10:59:00.000+01:00

De vs Du, De la, Des - French Prepositions and Articles

I recently read a book I enjoyed called The Elegance of the Hedgehog, (in french) and the lovely concierge there made me want to improve my french grammar. So today I have to send off a grant proposal, thankfully most of it can be written in english, but they do ask for a 5000 character abstract in french, and that's where the apple fell, as they say. My french grammar still needs work. One of the things I have a hard time with is the use of "de" and "des". Found this web site, that is very clear, but these rules are too long to remember. I've decided that for now I'll jus remember the use in the negative (always "de").....

I am getting a better hang of the accents, until now I have been depending on the spell checker, but I've recently realized that if I put them in myself (using a french keyboard) it actually goes faster. i still get a bunch worng, but it's improving.

Anyway, I have pulled an all nighter for this grant. Had not happened in years. But now I'm all woozy .... just waiting for my colleague to correct the abstract and then I'm off to dreamland.

Paper Airplane Designs

2008-07-18T14:11:00.001+02:00

Paper Airplane Designs

good summertime activity !

and here you can learn something about the physics of paper airplanes....

:-)

creme fraiche and peanut butter

2008-07-12T11:53:00.002+02:00

you know you've been long enough in the states when you start eating peanut butter from the jar, by the same token you know you've been long enough in france when you start eating crème fraiche in the same fashion .... getting there .... but not quite to the point of making butter and cheese sandwiches

trainspotting !

2008-06-25T14:39:00.000+02:00

Gare SNCF, Trains à l'arrivée en gare de Paris Nord

fascinating.... you can look at any train station.... let your mind travel !!

Brooks: Neural Buddhists - International Herald Tribune

2008-05-14T17:41:00.000+02:00

Brooks: Neural Buddhists - International Herald Tribune

more about Buddhism, the brain, religion vs atheism, religion vs science
I'm torn, in a way I like the idea that we can control our brain to some extent
however I don't like the fact that these new studies could explain why we feel such a sense of wonder sometimes
it's like looking behind the curtain at oz
or when the magician tells you their trick
where did I hear this recently, we don't want to know the trick, we prefer being surprised and being in wonder every time, and try to imagine how it is done, but we don't want the solution

active rewiring of the brain: actions and emotions

2008-05-11T12:11:00.009+02:00

On the ted talks site there are sevral talks about the brain that I found very interesting, here's a sample. From the "tricks" that it plays on our perceptions (also this one on consciousness especially for the intro) because of its reliance on expectations from past experience due to its structural organization, (for that you might want to see Jeff Hawkins' talk (also see post on sine wave speech)), and how we can trick it by similar means during physical rehabilitation after a stroke or the loss of a limb (check this out if ever wondered about self awareness).

And speaking of self awareness, what happens when you lose it ?
Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuroscientist who has suffered a stroke, a hemorrage on the left side of the brain, and thus lost activity from her left side of the brain and she describes what that felt like. She describes is as the ultimate experiment for a neuroscientist, watch the brain as it misfunctions from the inside !! She can thus see the effects of disconnecting the left and right sides of the brain and she decribes what each side does. In the absence of activity from the left side of the brain she felt a connection to everything, she felt larger than her physical self. She decsribes it as a nirvana.
But then when you watch the talk by buddist monk Matthieu Ricard (described below) he shows recent results on MRI scans of buddist monks brains meditating on compassion and it is the left side of the brain that has a much higher level of activity compared to nonmeditating people..... the dalai lama talks about he importance of interconnectedness (see webcasts on his web site), but also on how it is important to know yourself, and that seems to be the job of the left side of the brain, so it seems to me that this means that you cannot have real compassion if you cannot put the interconnectedness from the right side of the brain in the context of your identity on the left side of your brain. (see here for an article based on the talk the dalai lama gave at the Society for Neroscience in 2005 and for further information on the scientific basis of the effects of meditation).

Christopher deCharms shows how new developments in brain imaging (MRI) has considerably increased the time resolution of imaging so that you can now follow the change in activity inside your brain as you think or move.... they have been using this for people suffering from chronic pain, to influence the dynamics of their own brain to control the perception of pain. The idea is that if you see a specific part of your brain lit up as a reaction to something you have done then you can repeat that action and recognize it and develop it, affecting the wiring in your brain. This is similar to how a violinist or an athlete by practice can rewire their brain for specific actions. And this practice we know does not necessarily need to be only physical, we can just think of the movements we need to make for our brain to learn them and reinforce their pattern and sequence to have a better coordination of all the motions necessary.

Something similar probably happens with our emotions.

Matthieu Ricard, a french buddist monk (formerly a molecular biologist), defines happiness and how we can work on our mind to control how much impact different emotions can have, and he describes some of the experiments that are now being done on "professional" meditators to measure how their brains are physically affected by their practice.
This is interesting because we often tend to give a lot of importance to our emotions, if I feel angry about this there must be a good reason for it and so I should act on it, and reinforce it in a feedback cycle by finding more reasons to support it. But we don't often stop to think of the validity of that emotion, its source. This can have detrimental effects on negative emotions such as anger, jealousy or depression, but also on positive emotions, where we go back and try to find reasons to validate those emotions so that we fall into illusions of happiness, we build a parallel universe where we don't see all that we don't want to see.
These seem to be innate instincts that are there because in the short term they may be very useful, but they have to be recognized as such.
In a future post I will develop more on the idea of how we can recognize the source of our emotional response and its dependence on our beliefs that were created by our culture, society and our environment (it's actually something my mother works on).

A lot of work has been done recently on how we make decisions (it is of interest for economists trying to make simulations of the market..), one interesting aspect of this work is that it suggests that we tend to validate our decision by discounting the alternative options as worse, we quickly convince ourselves that we made the right decision so that we stop wondering about it. There is still a lot of debate about this, but I think it is interesting that it is being studied. Related to this is the book Blink by malcolm gladwell for example.

FreeRice

2008-03-11T20:23:00.000+01:00

check this out, improve your vocabulary and donate rice at the same time ! nifty ...

FreeRice

we are sooooo tiny !

2008-02-18T12:38:00.003+01:00

click on the image and watch.....

Really cool, really simple experiment

2008-01-18T11:04:00.000+01:00

what freezes first, hot or cold water ?

try this experiment at home
I would add some unstirred food coloring.....

SBE Activity

John K. in Naples .... ?

2008-01-17T21:49:00.000+01:00

this image comes from the cnn site. of course it is of naples. it reminds me of this book (link below). I wonder if there is a John Kaltenbrunner somewhere .... what if this was someone's subtle plan to undo camorra's hold on the region. However it does not seem to work, as I read in the editorial page of the IHT today.

Lord of the Barnyard : Killing the Fatted Calf and Arming the Aware in the Corn Belt: Books: Tristan Egolf

Sine-wave speech demos

2008-01-12T13:50:00.000+01:00

Sine-wave speech demos

ok, now, go to this web site, listen to the SWS file and see whatyou can understand, then listen to the original speech and then go back to the SWS .... remind you of anything ? could this explein why it's sometimes difficult to understand a foreign language ?

The Genographic Project

2008-01-10T22:18:00.000+01:00

Tempting .... very tempting .... as any scientist will tell you the ultimate experiment is you.... so if you want to know the history in your DNA and take part in a real experiment here is your chance.... for just 99.95 US dollars :

How to Participate - The Genographic Project

I made cookies

2007-12-15T14:35:00.000+01:00

The recipes are from The Joy of Cooking. The "fourteen in one" recipe, the lemon poppyseed variation and the chocolate cinnamon one. The chocolate ones were made by the "squashed ball "method, it works very well. Just have to remember to flour the bottom of the glass everytime.

which one is your favorite ?

2007-12-12T13:47:00.000+01:00

TED | Theme | Evolution's Genius

there are so many .... where should one start ?

what's your sequence ?

2007-12-12T10:40:00.000+01:00

deCODEme

so, you ever wandered what your DNA sequence looked like ? for just under 1000 dollars you might just find out. not that it will reveal your future, maybe will give you some probabilities of some diseases, but most of the things that will happen to you will not be dictated by your DNA, at least not in simple uncomplex format as analyzed here. I wonder if they'll be able one day to add epigenetic data to the sequences. that might add an additional layer of information. and even then, I don't know if I would want to find out, would I become worried and paranoid if I knew I had a certain probability of having a disease ?
The thing I would be curious about would be to learn about the past. where did my ancestors come from ? I find journeys interesting. but I would not pay 1000 dollars for it.

There is an interesting discussion on the sciam web site about james watson's comments on race and intelligence. Is intelligence linked to our DNA ? which intelligence ? how do we measure intelligence ? is knowledge stored in DNA ? some of it....

I'm not there

2007-11-23T19:07:00.000+01:00

Todd Haynes talks of the movie and dylan with images

Nobel

2007-10-09T13:36:00.000+02:00

A friend of mine last night asked me to explain what the scientist who just won the noble price in medicine did, and why it is so important, he mentioned it had something to do with DNA. At the time I had not heard about it yet, but I looked it up and found an article in the IHT telling about the medical repercussions of this technique as well as the adventurous story of the italian origins of one of the three.

The three scientists won the prize because they found a way of turning off ("knocking out") a specific gene in mice, any specific gene in fact, which has been very useful to study the function of the gene's product. This was especially useful because for a long time people thought that from one gene you get one product (a protein) which has a specific function. Very linear.
This is the idea, quite reductionist, that sold the human genome project: read the sequence, find the genes, find the cure.
The "knock out" experiments have shown that in reality this is true in only a few cases.
Most of the times "knocking off" one gene results in so many effects that it makes it difficult to pinpoint one specific function, this is because the gene's product interacts with so many other proteins in all kinds of cells, or because it is part of a chain reaction that can affect many different processes downstream. Other times the knockout has no effect at all, because our cells have a backup plan, in case anything goes wrong and they compensate, or because it is a gene that is used only under special, often stressful, occasions.
So these experiments have shown that things are not so linear after all, but a lot more complex, more of a network in fact, that is constantly changing with time.

At the end of the article the scientists are quoted as saying that at first their ideas were not accepted, and their grants were turned down because it was deemed an unfeasible project... five years later they finally got the grant, and five years after that everyone else was already using the technique. Now there are "mice banks" hosting up to 10,000 knockout mice !

Music !

2007-09-26T13:23:00.000+02:00

here's the much anticipated well overdue live music post !
Starting from the most recent, tonight I'm going to hear vanupié in belleville, don't know them at all but they seem like fun, good old fashioned crazy french music.
Last night was at the musica nuda concert. An italian duo, Ferruccio Spinetti e Petra Magoni, he on base, she on voice, many covers (nicely rearranged for the most part), some originals, some cabaret. It's a performing-singing jazz style that I have seen more and more recently. And speaking of, the opening band, Sashird Lao, a trio from Nice, a lot of fun, a mixture of jazz, rhythmic a capella, sampling, percussion, one of the two guys plays base with his voice, the other is a king of scat and the lady sings and writes egyptian songs. Check out their web site. Both groups I think are a lot more fun live than on a recording just because it is very impressive what they manage to do with very few instruments and incredible voices.

the show was at the Cabaret Sauvage, up at la Villette, perfect venue for this kind of performance, since it looks like a circus, with mirror and red velvet decorations (and they even grilled sausages outside!).

Other recent concerts have included Rilo Kiley, Wilco (excellent ! of course, and at the Bataclan, smallish venue), Bonnie Prince Billy (another one much more fun live than on record, but you gotta like that style).

On sunday it will be the New Pornographers, missed Neko Case last time she was in Paris bc I went to see one of the last Sleater Kineey concerts.... so I'm looking forward to this one, and then in october Ani di Franco, curious to see what she's been up to lately, kinda lost track in the past couple of years. The last time she had come to Paris it was for an acoustic show that was quickly sold out.

short but sweet, more soon....

prague architecture

2007-09-22T10:57:00.000+02:00

downtown split in the morning

2007-09-22T10:55:00.000+02:00

Chocolate cakes ! As decadent as possible !

2007-09-22T09:15:00.000+02:00

ok, so I've decided that if you're going to make a chocolate cake you should just look away from all those low fat, lite option out there, just make the original thing, and try not to eat it all yourself, bring it to work, to a birthday party invite friends over, share in the decadence !
these days it seems that what is really bad for you is the processes foods, because of the different kinds of oils and additives they put in, so what is better than making it on your own, you know exactly what's in it, and how much of it, chocolate, sugar, butter, eggs and a bit of flour.

So, I've tried three different chocolate recipes recently, two come from the Zucchini and Chocolate blog, the third, and the upcoming fourth one come from a Cucina Italiana little chocolate book.

(musical aside: I'm listening to the Decembrists, Valencia on the last album, just love how it sounds so much like an REM song... it's like comfort food, know what I mean ? Every band I listen to lately has a pinch of the pixies here, a taste of REM there, some Velvet Underground tones, and even some sleater kinney accents, it's a nice feeling when your memory gets tickled !)

yes a music entry is way overdue, been to a couple of show have not reported on yet, but you can see what I've been listening to on that last.fm link on the right, I'm also trying to get lala.com setup, it claims it will let me listen to the music on my home itunes while at work...

so, back to chocolate, there are two main families of chocolate cakes, the fluffy ones and the gooye ones. For me the perfect one is somewhere in between, a rich, fluffy cake. There is the moelleux au chocolat, which is fluffy on the outside and warm and liquid on the inside, have not made that yet, mainly because you need to have individual little bakeproof ceramic cups. But then there is the Sachetorte the queen of all chocolate cakes, which I have made before, but a long time ago, and so will attempt again soon.

The danger with fluffy cakes is that when the fluffyness comes from baking soda you might get some backing soda backtaste, the best to get your cake fluffy is probably by beating the egg whites, although it is more work, it might be worth it. So to cut to the chase I have tried the "melt in your mouth chocolate cake" with a name like that, how can you resist ! That is at the gooye end of the scale, and veeeery decadent, and another recipe from the Chocolate and Zucchini blog, the aerial cake, on the fluffy end of the scale. Both got very good votes from friends and coworkers, but my favorite is something more in the middle that I made for my friend Henriette's bday party. I was looking for a cake where the dark chocolate to sugar ratio was maximized, and that was not too gooye or too baking soda-fluffy. It comes from the Cucina Italiana little book I mentioned before, but could not find it on their web site.

320 g dark chocolate (11 ounces)
160 g butter (5.5 ounces)
160 g sugar
40 g flour (a full tablespoon and a bit more)
5 eggs

preheat the oven at 175 °C, 350° F
melt the chocolate butter and sugar on top of boiling water on in the microwave on the low-med setting. Mix it well with a beater, the recipe says until it "grows" but it's a bit too thick to do any growing at this point. Beat the egg whites till stiff. When the chocolate mix has cooled down add the egg yolks while beating some more and the flour, then carefully add the egg whites.
Bake for 40 minutes.

PS chocolate cakes taste better the next day.... but you wont know unless you taste some before too :-)

So this might be the beginning of the quest for the perfect cake, or a temporary passion, although my taste for chocolate is not temporary at all.

on the road

2007-08-05T16:53:00.000+02:00

after a long hiatus I'm back. that's because I am finally on vacation !
Yesterday (was it just yesterday ?) I flew from paris to prague and from prague to split, with a 6 hour layover, which ended up being a very good thing for at least two reasons, the first is that we left paris late due to a bomb scare at the airport, the second is that it gave me time to go to prague and take a bike tour through the city.

I would highly recommend doing the bike tour through prague ! It is a very nice way to get a feel of the city and get oriented, it is the first time I had done such a thing but apparently it is possible in other cities as well. I will post pictures as soon as I find a way to upload them. Prague is a jewel of a city, very beautiful, I will defenetly go back, for longer next time, and probably not in august, too many tourists. I almost killed a few of them because I was not used to the cruiser bike with the backpedal brakes !

now I am in split, doing a workshop on interdisciplinary research, it begins tonight. The setting is fantastic and the weather has cooled down since last week, which is a good thing. This morning I woke up early and took a nice walk through the quiet sunday morning downtown, the market was already buzzing with activity, and now I think back of the figs and blackberries that I didn't buy...

Haruki Murakami quote

2007-07-24T10:31:00.000+02:00

it's true for lyrics as well I guess.

One of my all-time favorite jazz pianists is Thelonious Monk. Once, when
someone asked him how he managed to get a certain special sound out of the piano, Monk pointed to the keyboard and said: “It can’t be any new note.
When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you
mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you
really mean!”
I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, “It’s
true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and
special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.” I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them.

Haruki Murakami ( Novelist )

parthenogenesis for the modern girl

2007-05-24T13:17:00.000+02:00

Sharks can do it (see below), for humans it's still a bit more difficult.... but what if... ?

basically the main reason seems to be that it is not just the sequence of our DNA that matters, but also whether parts of it have been modified. These modifications can affect the activity of a given gene, and they are passed on from one cell division to the next. The pattern of modification is different in male and females, and it turns out that these differences are very important for the proper development of the embryo, including its brain...

in the wikipedia entry quoted below they mention that by reproducing some of the male modifications in a female genome they were able to come up with a fullyfemale mouse.... science fiction is not so far away !

Female Shark Reproduced Without Male DNA, Scientists Say

Previously, Dr. Schuett said, zookeepers and others tended to discount evidence of virgin births precisely because they were so out of the ordinary. But in recent years it has been found in Komodo dragons, other lizards and snake species.

“It’s all over the place,” Dr. Schuett said.

Still, parthenogenesis among vertebrates tends to be rare, and, while it may occur in the wild, has been documented only in captivity.

“It’s a last-resort tactic that animals use when they absolutely can’t find another mate,” Dr. Hueter said.

While it has the advantage of ensuring the survival of a species in the absence of males, it also comes at a cost: a loss of genetic diversity. And that, Dr. Shivji said, may spell conservation problems for some shark species whose populations are declining. If it becomes more difficult for female sharks in the wild to find a mate and instead they reproduce through parthenogenesis, then the offspring will be less genetically diverse, making the species more susceptible to diseases and other problems.

But Dr. Hueter said he thought it unlikely that most sharks, which are highly mobile, would end up so isolated that parthenogenesis would be much of a factor. Sharks have plenty of other problems that are of potentially greater impact.

“I would be concerned about a lot of other things than whether or not a female shark can get a date for an evening,” he said.

From wikipedia's entry on genomic imprinting:

Experimental manipulation of mouse embryos in the early 1980s showed that normal development requires the contribution of both the maternal and paternal genomes. Gynogenetic embryos (containing two female genomes) show relatively normal embryonic development, but poor placental development. In contrast, androgenetic embryos (containing two male genomes) show very poor embryonic development but normal placental development. Further investigation identified that these phenotypes were the result of unbalanced imprinted gene expression (Barton et al., 1984; McGrath and Solter, 1984).

The gynogenetic embryos have twice the normal level of maternally expressed genes, and completely lack expression of paternally expressed genes, whereas the reverse is true for androgenetic embryos. It is now known that there are approximately 80 imprinted genes in humans and mice, many of which are involved in embryonic and placental growth and development (Isles and Holland, 2005; Morison et al., 2005; Reik and Lewis, 2005; Wood and Oakey, 2006).

No naturally occurring cases of parthenogenesis exist in mammals because of imprinted genes. Experimental manipulation of a paternal methylation imprint controlling the Igf2 gene has, however, recently allowed the creation of rare individual mice with two maternal sets of chromosomes - but this is not a true parthenogenote. Hybrid offspring of two species may exhibit unusual growth due to the novel combination of imprinted genes.^[1]

dancin' bugs

2007-04-05T00:36:00.000+02:00

I'm back, been a while I know, lots more to come, but in the meanwhile enjoy my first bacteria dance video, have to figure out how to add the music, let me know if you know how to do it, here it is :

A perfect day

2007-03-14T13:04:00.000+01:00

Spring has arrived, there are flowers everywhere, and the sun is back, ah !
Here's a picture of Menilmontant on saturday night:

I should have said perfect weekend in the title, because already saturday, though a bit hazy at first turned out to be a nice day too, the birthday party of one year old Giulia :-) . (will have cute baby picts of course).
Sunday I skipped on my usual trip to the Marché d'Aligre because I still had veggies in the fridge from the previous one (somehow once I'm there I'm only limited to how much I can carry home). Instead went and had a nice walk along the canal St. Martin, and then up and over to a bustling rue Faubourg du Temple and rue de Belleville. In Paris most of the shops are closed on sunday, but not in this neighborhood where you can find hallal meat shop, next to a kosher supermarket, just down the street from the chinese grocer with all these unknown vegetables I wish I knew how to cook.

On rue de Belleville we stopped for a nice lunch at one of the best Thai restaurants I know in Paris. Of course I don't remember the name, but if you walk uphill from metro Belleville, you pass the first light, and a little farther up on the left you'll see it, it's quite large. Here you can find superb thai food that is nicely spicy (food in Paris in general tends to be quite on the mild side), I recommend the fish in the banana leaf, the shrimp in coconut milk and of course a nice plate of pad thai. oh ! and the calamari salad ! nice and hot !

the afternoon we slowly walked our way down to republique and then through the marais, another bustling neighborhood on sunday, with a lot of shops open, but quite different from the ones in Belleville. Here you'll find the latest design and fashion, and on rue de Rosiers the nice kosher bakeries and falafel shops. Rue vielle du temple is invaded by pedestrians, so if you can get a table at one of the cafés there's some good trendy crowd watching.

The point of our walk was to go to my favorite pub to watch the rugby game of france against england. The fact that italy won its last two games in the six nation tournament might have something to do with my renewed interest in this sport, and it was also a key game, that, since it was won by england, now next weekend the final games will determine which of the tied top three teams will win, and next weekend is also st patrick's and italy is playing ireland (one of the top three) so it bodes to be another interesting weekend.

Finally I took the metro all the way up to la villette for the concert of the And You'll Know us by the Trail of the Dead ! The opening band, who played too short a set, was great, they are called forget cassettes and you should defenetly check them out. The lady in charge (Beth Cameron) has a great voice, and some good ideas, she was with a shifting cast of musicians from the Trail of the Dead. The main act rocked of course, and there was even a pit, for a short while ! (It was in the Trabendo, nice small venue). Here's a pict, as usual with my cell phone, this is when Beth from forget cassettes came on stage with the trail of the dead:

after the show a nice kebab sandwich and then off to bed, sunday night is still a school night after all, and I had to start thinking of what I would make for monday dinner (8 friends came over... pici with ragu' ai porcini, not bad...). Such a perfect day.
Publish

scootering in paris

2007-02-24T17:59:00.000+01:00

ever wondered what it's like to ride on the back of my scooter ?

The Decembrists, La Maroquineire, Paris, Feb 22

2007-02-24T16:20:00.000+01:00

Voila a photo of the decembrists show taken with my phone ! can't see much I'll admit, but maybe you get an idea of how cosy it was. The maroquineire (nice jukebox on web site) is a great small venue, 500 people tops, up in Menilmontant, in the 20th arrondissement, many nice funky little bars near. But back to the show, most of the time I was mesmerized, the lead singer's voice sounded so much like the one on the album ! Of course, but he does have a very particular voice. fell in love with the drummer (as wilco says) who looked like one of the guys from the little house on the prarie with the vest and the beard. In the end I even decided I might check out their last album, especially for the Shankill Butchers song. Of course they played the legionnaire song, since it talks about Paris, getting a few cheers from the audience (a good fraction american college students). They finished up the show (the last of the european leg) by inviting the opening band (with their ~1 yr baby with baby headphones on!) and singing a perfect rocking cover of "feel like making love" by Bad Company, with accordeon too.

This is the venue where I saw one of the concerts that is in my top ten list of best concerts ever: Wilco at the maroquinerie....

early Spring in Paris, little flowers with a grey sky

2007-02-24T14:30:00.000+01:00

it was unseasonably warm for a few days, the flowers started to bloom. now it's cold again. the flowers might freeze and we wont have fresh fruit, what will april in paris by like this year ? OK, go out and get some of those fluorescent lightbulbs, to begin (you know australia is phasing out all old lightbulbs ?).

speaking of....

2007-02-22T12:27:00.000+01:00

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | NZ fishermen land colossal squid

squids ! (and octopi)

2007-02-21T13:02:00.000+01:00

check out these videos:

this one is of a huge squid filmed by japanese researchers, like many deep ocean fish it glows in the dark.... news @ nature.com - Squid vid shows swimming surprise - Pictures from the depths reveal luminous and speedy animal..

the national geographic has a cool video of an octopus meeting a shark... and one passing through a very small hole, there are some advantages to having no bones !
Video: Giant Octopus Battles Shark
Video: Octopus Escapes Through One-Inch Hole

more about squids and octopus :
wildlife museum of sidney

of course there is a whole page only about octopus:
www.tonmo.com

and an octopus cartoon cooking show that looks pretty funny...
www.8legged.com

fun french music

2007-02-18T15:50:00.000+01:00

a new song every week by the guys of beaubourg: la chanson du dimanche .
Beaubourg are actually a french/italian band. They use both traditional, tarantella-like italian music and french folk music, a lot of fun to dance to... and as long as I'm talking about fun fench music check out the page for Les Princes Chameaux. There's only three of them, but they make more noise than the legendary negresses vertes, (or last.fm link) and it's impossible not to dance and sing along. Ils sont ouf ! et sympa aussi. I guess the negresses vertes are a bit like what the Pogues are to ireland...

I put an egg in the microwave. that's cool dude !

2007-02-16T12:29:00.000+01:00

I put an egg in the mocrowave this morning. I woke up late (the week at the synchrotron messed up my sleeping patterns, I go into the deep dreams phase btw 7-9 am! at which point the alarm clock just becomes part of the dream and thus useless) anyway, so I had to prepare a quick lunch. No, I did not put a whole egg in the microwave, I know you are not supposed to do that (there are quite a few movies of that on utube, the best is probably the slo mo exploding egg). I cracked it open and put it in a bowl. You can watch the white part gradually cook, as an expanding deep freeze in a movie, and then... the egg yolk blows up ! So next time either put some sarand wrap on top or pierce to egg yolk... but that was way cool dude !
It's faster than making a hard boiled egg, it's "low fat" (lowre than a fried egg that is) it's easier than making a poached egg... this egg didn't come out poached bc by the time the white part was cooked the yolk had as well... there must be a way though... found it ! there is a whole web site on egg recipes, only in the UK !

the new internet part two

2007-02-02T17:52:00.001+01:00

I'm back in the belly of the beast, the synchrotron. and so continues my reporting from the exploration of the new internet:

another thing you can do with the new internet is use it to store bookmarks, quickly store and organize your bibliography, and share these things with other people, either everyone on the web or only the ones you want.

If your job includes working with bibliographic references you have been as amazed as me to have witnessed the amount of help the internet has contributed to making this part of our job easier. I'm old enough to have had to use the citation index in the library during my undergrad thesis, then to have to manually type in each entry in a reference sofware during my PhD and more recently to use this software to search references on the web and include them automatically in my documents (and format the bibliography according to each publisher's specifications !). Now it's all on line (and sometimes free, yei !), you can store and share your database on the web. One of the advantages is that you have immediate links to all the papers citing or cited by that article, the 'related papers' features, supplemetary materials and so on.
The information is out there, you just have to know how to take advantage of it: organize it, keep track of it and make sense of it. There is so much !

So for bibliography I have found endnoteweb (sometimes free, depends on your affiliation), connotea (always free, you could theoretically link in an article from any page, while endnoteweb works through web of knowledge, but it doesn't always get all the citation data), reference manager (never free as far as I can tell, have not tested it online).

For storing bookmarks there are loads out there, they can be helpful in finding some interesting sites you were not necessarily looking for. The most popular seems to be del.ico.us, you can tag your bookmarks and see what other people are bookmarking. Digg appears similar, it's like you can vote for the sites you find interesting, and add comments, if you have time to kill you can start there. The google toolbar lets you store bookmarks that you can access from any computer, but that only works in IE (blah).

So what would happen if one day all the internet connections went down thanks to a massive power outage (or something similar?). You better back things up... especially your bibliography.

my turn again in the hutch, I just love the smell of ozone in the morning !

The new internet

2007-02-02T13:02:00.000+01:00

I've been exploring the possibilities of the new internet. Yahoo for example has upgraded its email and calendar to look and act more like your own desktop applications, it also has widgets that you can install on your own desktop, it's mainly for PC user's mac-envy, they are cute, but they might slow down your computer I'm told.
Same goes for Google. Google desktop is like one big widget holder. What is more interesting is the google documents and spreadsheets. You can keep documents on a web site and invite people in to collaborate. For example, I will put up a document for song lyrics (soon), I write the first part, and you get to add on to it a second, and someone else a third, an old game that we can play across the globe. Same goes for spreadsheets. I have been using the google spreadsheet to keep track of my diet.
I recently lost about 50 lbs. Now I have to stabilize, so I still have to keep an eye on things. So I decided to test the google spreadsheet by making a calendar (you can find templates on the microsoft web site). Each meal is color coded, green if very good for you, red if it's deep fried pizza and chocolate mousse (more on the diet in future posts). This way I can follow the patterns, you know, every time you have a deep fried pizza (also called panzerotto) you should not have another one for at least a couple of days, and so a red case should be followed by a couple of green ones. If there are e few green days in a row then it means that if I have lasagna one night then it will not be the end of the world. Anyway, to come back to the point, this spreadsheet is online, so I can access it whether I'm at work, at home or on the road.
Another example of the new internet is the thingy I put there on the right. It's a link to an excel template I made to keep track of eating patterns. It's stored on a site called box.net, I can keep 1GB of stuff there for free. They are not the only ones I guess, but it works pretty well so far. So you can just go there and download the template, then upload it into google documents. I could have done it directly on Google documents by sharing or publishing the template on there, but I just wanted to try this other thing.
Finally you can make a personalized google home page where you keep track of all these different things you have set up.
All this raises lots of questions about internet dependency and security, but lunch time is over, more soon.

Martha Stewart in the lab ?

2007-01-26T15:29:00.001+01:00

What if we invited Martha Stewart to the lab ? She could do a show on how to pour the perfect sequencing gel, or how to make competent bacteria, purify DNA .... humm.... just imagine ...
fade out...

So, today we will be pouring a sequencing gel. A sequencing gel is a 0.5 mm thin slab of gel uniformly spread between two glass plates, it is used to separate DNA fragments that are just one nucleotide base larger than the next.

So, first we'll need:

two glass plates, these are about 50 cm tall and 35 cm wide, note that one is about 3 cm shorter
two spacer strips 0.5 cm thick
a comb (we will use to create the wells in the gel where the sample is applied)
a 8M, 1X TBE, 20 % acrylamide solution
a 8M urea, 1XTBE solution to dilute the acrylamide
10 % ammonium persulfate
TEMED

now, there are as many ways to pour a sequencing gel as there are scientists in a lab. my preferred technique is using these silicon gaskets. I find them quite practical to avoid leaks.

etc. etc. ....fade back in ... maybe I'll do that, I'll make a video and post it, ha ! I do it often enough with the students, next time I'll just tell them to watch the video...

Everyone knows that science is a lot like cooking, so she should have no trouble at all to adjust.

The commute, part one

2007-01-25T15:00:00.000+01:00

After years of relying mostly on my bicicle and the scooter (we were inseperable ! which was not always a good thing) I began using public transportaion in Paris. Paris has a highly extended network of metro lines, RER lines (commuter trains to the rest of ile de france and suburbs) and buses. The trains stop running at around 1 am (now 2 am on sat !) but they are taken over by a very efficient night bus system which has been recently revamped (we all love Delanoe ! the mayor of Paris, but he deserves another post of his own). There is also a brand new slick Tram line, more from Dolanoe's effort to make people leave their cars at home.
Of course I had previously taken public transport, however not exactly during rush hour. There are a lot more people on the metro between 8 and 9 am ! That was quite something the first few days. Took a few weeks actually to get used to seeing these rivers of people flowing through the corridors, tiling up on the quais, jamming into the trains. All kinds of different people, wow, so much to look at, so many fashion faux pas ! so many fashion victims (not that I am anywhere near an expert on the subject, but my uncle is, and a bit must have rubbed off). I had no idea there were so many people in paris, you see a lot less from the scooter. These rivers of people sometimes are more like swarms. I don't know if you've ever seen the birds in Rome. They fly in large groups and they make like big black flowing clouds. The closest analogy is actually the bats in Austin, TX: there is a large long corridor at the entrance of the RER, at the end of the corridors there are deep escalators to either side going to the trains, invariably the river will veer off to the right, like the bats coming out from under the bridge. Only a few people will take the escalator on the left. Same thing happens when people get off the train.

The commute, prologue

2007-01-25T12:44:00.000+01:00

About 13 months ago I stopped using my scooter to commute to the lab. A flat tire resulted in having to abandon it near the port royal RER station. I only brought it back home after christmas break, by then it was snowing (see photo). By then I had moved to the new apartment, very near many metro and RER lines, walking distance to Bastille, the marché d'Aligre and several nice cafés. The scooter spent more and more time on the sidewalk. In addition it is an old model, running on leaded gas. Having to add the concentrated lead solution to the "green" petrol was not so much fun either, and each time it caused a little pang to that part of me that worries about the polar bears swimming to their death.
So I caved in, bought a carte orange (the monthly metro pass) and began to commute to work by public transport.

kid photo

2007-01-16T20:37:00.000+01:00

guess who this is ...

Geek alert !

2007-01-11T15:51:00.000+01:00

dear friends, if you know any rich santa for next year, please tell them I would really like to have one of these thingies: the new apple iphone
thank you ! (not eve spock had something this cool)

X-mas cookies

2007-01-07T22:18:00.000+01:00

yes, we survived yet another holiday season. sara mitch and I made xmas cookies... one of my favories is the bear that swalled a giant E. coli on the lower left hand corner, mitch made that one.
the whole family came over for new year's, and we did a bunch of entertaining at the house. It was worth investing in a slightly bigger apartment, so that everyone can come over and be confortable, we even lit a fire a couple of times.

New year's eve menu :

mariarosa and rossella's warm apetizers
mitch and sara's salmon and blinis
homemade thick tagliatelle with shrimps, zaffron and red pepper
brasato, gratinéed leeks and endive
chocolate mousse
pandoro with creme anglaise
armagnac

(recipes to follow...)

oh, I finally found the charger for my camera, so there might be more photos in the posts to come. the weather is unusually warm in paris these days, kinda eerie.

Banana Yoshimoto Goodbye Tsugumi

2006-12-19T17:35:00.000+01:00

Here's an attempt to a book review. (just a little aside before I start, today we had our equipe's xmas lunch at the rungis market, another post about that later, so I am in a postprandial coma and do not dare do an experiment in these conditions, at the risk of contaminating the whole lab). So, Banana Yoshimoto, hugely popular in Japan, and abroad too by now, especially amongst teenager girls as I gather. I had read a couple of hers books a few years ago (probably 10?), enjoyed them, but came away once the pattern became old. Came back to Goodbye Tsugumi because I needed a small paperback to read in the metro and was still under the spell of murakmi haruki's wind up bird chronicles, and was looking for a similar mood, which I did find, and I was pleasantly surprised by this book. It felt a bit like a manga comic, where the figures are delineated and defined with a very thin, clean, black line, the colors pastel, and the ocean is in every square. Less self-involved with sorrow than the past books, a bit more perverse.
Next: lettera aperta, by Goliarda Sapienza, I haven't found it translated in english and it's a real pity.

Sonic Youth in Paris Dec 13th

2006-12-19T17:19:00.000+01:00

Here's a first attempt at a music review: Sonic Youth rocked ! No, really, they played in a fairly big venue, (the Zenith about 12,000 max), we, as the old people we've become, did not go and stand right in front of the stage, but it was fine just sitting on the stands (the last few concerts at the zenith standing, dylan twice and the white stripes, came out with a back ache, how embarassing !). Last year we had seen SY play at the small theater at the cité de la musique, just down the street, it was a much more contemplative jazz-like feedback concert, songs that lasted 15 mins. This time it rocked a lot more but it was equally fine. Loved the little shiny golden dress kim gordon was wearing, barefoot, she danced like a banshee and encouraged the pit to do as well. They played alot of the old stuff, not just the last album, like they had done when they were on the NY city ghost and flowers tour at the elisée montmatre (ok, now I am showing off a bit, but that concert was very good as well, and sleater kinney had opened !). Cannot say the same about Dinosaur Jr that opened, they were defenetly rusty, and stopped to tune their guitars in between songs, very annoying, especially bc their songs did not require a great tuneness of guitar.... so the contrast when SY came on was huge.

DNA knots

2006-11-28T13:24:00.000+01:00

Knots.... your own DNA could be doing this...eeek!

Thanksgiving in paris

2006-11-28T11:40:00.000+01:00

So, had the first International Thanksgiving at my new apart. This International Thanksgiving is now a parisian tradition. It started back in the days when my american friend Karen was here, and eventually the italians, irish, english and even the french got used to it and kept on coming back for the turkey, tha mashed potatoes and the pies. In the past I always have had to rely on the generosity of an old friend with a nice apartment with a big oven, so this was the first time out on my own. I think it turned out really well, a lot of friends came, some of them with their kids, which was a lot of fun, and the main thing is that the turkey was excellent ! (modestly) I was worried because it was much larger than I had expected. I had ordered it at the butcher's, I had asked for a 7 kilo (14 pounds) one... I arrive on sat morning and the two butchers, who are two sweet boys, brothers, who took over recently from their father, handed me a 10 kilo bird ! With a long explanation on how their order in turn had resulted in two small turkeys that they had to send back etc etc. Took the baby home and tried it out for fit in the oven....just barely !
And now from our non-sponsor a short advertising break: SMEG ovens are great ! they will cook a huge turkey in three hours and it's superjuicy and tasty, thanks to the ventilation option the heat is uniformly partitioned in the oven without burning the big bird ! (my old friend's apart. also had a SMEG oven)
Other delicacies on the menu included the sweet potato peanut stew from The Joy of Cooking (another non-sponsor that deserves an ad, or at least a link). It's excellent, don't be afrfaid of all the spicy things it asks for, by the end it's not nearly as hot as you'd imagine, but just enough. And then of course we had greens sautéd in garlic and peperoncino (blettes they are called in french I'll put in a photo bc I don't know the name in english)

the awsome home made italian mashed potatoes by rossella, wild rice, stuffing... we also had two stuffed pumpkins by kathleen, fantastic, and then apple pie, sweet potato pie and pumpkin muffins by yours truly and lots of other cakes !
Of course in the course of all the preparations I forgot to charge my digital camera, so I didn't take any photos, but maybe some of my friends did...

DNA - The Double Helix

2006-10-20T10:46:00.000+02:00

Play the DNA game !

DNA - The Double Helix

The very latest SOHO images

2006-10-20T10:40:00.000+02:00

What does the sun look like today ?

just look here:
The very latest SOHO images

The New Yorker: Shouts and Murmurs

2006-10-01T23:04:00.000+02:00

geek love, woody allen and string theory
The New Yorker: Shouts and Murmurs

Mahna Mahna (By Animal from the Muppets)

2006-10-01T17:55:00.000+02:00


du duru du !

La Linea, odcinek 108

2006-09-30T23:05:00.000+02:00


la linea

Impact and Influence

2006-09-30T23:00:00.000+02:00


Dylan's impact and influence, and fottage from the early years.

2006-09-30T22:56:00.000+02:00

I recently discovered google video... most of the stuff that is easy to access is not that interesting, but there are some good things there, do a search for "la linea" a great italian cartoon from the 70s, or for "public domain" to see old movies, there are some good documentaries apparently... let me know if you find something good, it has potential, but requires a bit of digging. I just figured out how to add videos to this blog, let's see if it works:

the renovation: heavenly bathtub

2006-09-30T22:08:00.000+02:00

So in the end of the day I decided that while I had workers redoing my upartment might as well redo the bathroom. It meant living on the couch for an additional two months, but it was worthy, here are some picts:

the second to last one is the project that my friend mari and I did. here's how you do it: you take a photograph of the space you want to redo with your digital camera, you print it out, then you can use semitransparent paper to draw a version of the room and add things like the tub and the sink by hand, and if you want some color, then you take a photograph of that and you open it in photoshop, where you can add patterns (such as tiles) and try different color schemes... ta dah ! Some people go directly from the photograph into photoshop without passing through the drawing part.

from the belly of the beast

2006-09-30T21:45:00.000+02:00

I'm writing from inside the synchrotron (www.esrf.fr). A synchrotron is a ring of about 200 meters in diameter made of magnets. Electron bunches travel around the ring. Every time they meet a magnet they turn. Electrons don't like to turn, they would rather keep on going straight, so every time they meet a magnet they lose energy, this energy is under the form of x-rays for the most part. The x-rays are collected by mirrors into beams that come out tangentially from the ring, we use the x-ray beams to do experiments, voila !

To be in here it is a bit eerie, I kinda like it, surrounded by lots of electronics, machines covered with aluminum foil (keeps the electric noise down it seems), vacuum pumps, cables everywhere, liquid nitrogen. The soft hum of the ventilators pads your hearing and helps to concentrate, like a sensory deprivation tank. Along those lines, there are no windows on the experimental floor, there is a constant amout of light, one easily loses the sense of time, makes it easier to work 24 hours a day (the machine never stops).

Now in the era of the internet there are lots of ways to keep amused while we wait for the data to accumulate enough to surface above noise, or for the nanometer long fluorescently labled DNA fragments to work their way through the mesh of the gel to the laser, where we can detect them. back in my student days there was no internet, imagine that, what did we do all night ? Sometimes we would go out and hang out with the deer (we were on Long Island) and look at the stars (http://www.fourmilab.ch/yoursky/) not too much light pollution in the middle of nowhere.

geeking delivery

2006-02-22T21:58:00.000+01:00

I'm at a friend's house, installing software and talking html, I sure hope the new bathtub will be installed when I get home.

I will not write here how rarely I have showered in the past two and a half weeks since the old space-eating chipped bathtub left my apartment. Suffice it to say the number of times fits on one hand. Add to this the permanent layer of dust covering everything, like living in the middle of a snow-white desert, thin dust which is now engrained in my skin, my apartment and I are becoming one, I have been breathing enough of its paint vapours, even with the windows open at night, that I am becoming an apartment borg !

can't wait to soak.

I might just have to buck down and go to the gym.

the shower will be imperative tomorrow, I don't really care what my coworkers think, but tomorrow evening I am invited to a soirée, and it would be good policy on the singlehood front to appear presentable.

which brings me to the laundry I should have done tonight, sigh ! I am currently laundromat dependent, like in the first months I arrived in paris, almost exactly 8 years ago, it's a bit nostalgic, not nearly as inconvinient and time-consuming as I had remembered (maybe because I know it's temporary), they now have a change machine in the place.

I cannot complain, all of the above, in addition to my personal space being inhabited by strange pakistani men (arriving somtimes before 8 am!), is worth it when I look at the apartment, and I see it improve, albeit slowly, it is much better than what I had imagined back when I had decided to buy.

hitech wonders

2006-02-20T23:10:00.000+01:00

so here I am, moving along the big highway in the sky... been talking more and more on skype to my friends near and far, actually for the moment I just write, the microphone is in one of the many unopened boxes adorning my apartment.... in some cases my friends talk and I write, it is a strange feeling, as if I had lost my voice, and I can't type nearly fast enough.

Last night I installed the tnt receiver on my computer, tnt is digital tv over ether, I can now watch tv on the computer, and it is of amazingly good quality, and full screen ! These kind of things can't stop amazing me.

OK, I admit it, I am a geek, a card carrying one at that (just got it in the mail from the french govt, I'll put up a picture of it as soon as I figure out how to transfer photographs from my new phone to the computer). Ah ! And this is another one ! My phone takes good quality pictures ! and it cost only 9 euros ! they throw technology at you these days, trying to convince you to use all the extra things you thought you could live without, but now that I can take pictures with my phone I want to send them too, and that costs extra...

next: how high tech helped my newbe house decorating efforts.....