Great talk about the crisis and the disciplines in science that will drastically change for the next few years, with an excellent orator, Juan Enriquez:

Everything you wanted to know about the Credit Crunch and never dared to ask, via Laughing Squid.

I have been testing the Vodafone Mobile Connect 3G USB Modem for a couple of days. The USB Modem that Vodafone is selling supports UMTS (3G), HSDPA, and GPRS, and automatically uses the fastest network connection available.

The Vodafone bundle of this modem (a Huawei E220), comes in a Apple-white style, with a Vodafone logo. It weights next to nothing (less that 50g, the official site says), and if it weren't for the USB cable you have to attach, you could easily put it in any pocket.

This particular modem works nicely with Macs, you just have to download the software from the Vodafone site: Vodafone Mobile Connect. If you don't have access to an internet connection, the salesperson will kindly offer to install it for you.

Remember when I told you that the Jericho cancellation by CBS (Nuts for Jericho) had united fans all over the world?

People were signing online petitions, calling the CBS offices and sending mail. They even were sending nuts, in a tribute to Jake Green's (one of the main characters) last words on the show.

Well, I guess all this support for the series (and the lack of space of the CBS headquarters to store a whopping 20 tons of nuts, I guess) made them think about renewing it.

And they have! With a message in the Jericho wiki, CBS announces they will be renewing Jericho as a 7-episode season for next year, with the possibility of renewing it for more seasons depending on ratings.

Even if you didn't see, or didn't like the show, I think it's nice to see how people can make themselves be listened.

We all know the Statue of Liberty was a gift from France to the US, as a commemoration for the centennial of the foundation of the country.

What is probably unknown to most people is the problems that Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, the man behind the idea, had to go through to finally ship and mount his statue in NYC.

It is a true story of willingness and persistence, worth the reading: Neatorama - The True Story of the Statue of Liberty

If there is something that I've always liked is the pressure that some united guys on the Internet can do.

For those of you who don't know, CBS decided not to continue the drama series Jericho with a new season, leaving the viewers with an unfinished ending.

Jericho is a post-nuclear attack drama series, based on a small town in Kansas called Jericho, in how such a small town can survive the radiation, the lack of electricity, communications, et cetera. It was really a refreshingly different series.

One of the reasons why Jericho has had such low ratings is because CBS sliced the series in half, with a pause of about 3 months.

What is amazing is the popular response to the cancellation of the series: it has been featured in several front page digg articles, starting from online petitions (over 68000 signatures now), and ending up in a massive sending of nuts to the CBS, as a symbol of the last words of the main character.

After the amount of mails, and nuts, i guess, received at CBS, the CBS President, Nina Tassler, issued a statement saying they were working in a solution to provide a closure for the series.

Anyway, if you like the series, sign the petition, or send some nuts. If you haven't seen it, you can get it from the iTunes Store. There's even a site called Jericho Lives where they keep track of all the petitions.

So I was in Paris a couple of weeks ago. Apart from some nice walking (see the Jardin des Tuileries below) and some museum visiting, I went to one of the nicest restaurants in Paris, which is L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon.

L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon, is apparently the 13th best restaurant in the world, better for instance than Alain Ducasse's in the Plaza Athenee, which is certainly more expensive.

One of the most surprising things when you enter is the disposition of the tables. Everyone is seated around the central block (where the kitchen is), in a bar-style way. The price you may expect to pay is around 100 euro, let the waiter recommend you (or get the Sole if they have it), and get a nice glass of wine.

By the way, I completely recommend (if you like Monet) - and I'm pretty sure you've already been to the Musée d'Orsay - to go to the Musée Marmottan Monet. It's quite a small museum in the 16th arrondisement (2, Rue Louis-Boilly), and a bit far from the usual museum places, but it's worth it (La Muette metro station is the nearest one, or 10 euro for a taxi from the Champs Elysées). They have one of the most important collections of Monet, including a series of Nymphéas.

Joshua Bell, one of the world's greatest violinists, decides to get his million-dollar Stradivarius and play in a metro station in Washington D.C. for about 45 minutes, like many other musicians who play in the streets, to see whether someone will recognise him and how many people will actually stop to listen. The entire performance was recorded by a camera, and the video is posted in the article.

He decides not to play popular pieces that might draw interest by its familiarity. However, some of the masterpieces he performs are written by Bach, Schubert and Jules Massenet.

About 1,000 people pass by, and only three people actually stop to listen, with one person recognising him. Honestly, I think what is particularly sad is the fact that the great mass of the people are not interested in classical music anymore, preferring all kinds of so-called popular music. Before you say, that can only happen in America, I am pretty sure that in Europe such an experiment will have the same results. Put a rock star or a nobody-who-is-on-tv on a metro station and you will have to send the police to be able to get the famous guy out of there.

One of the best articles I have read for some time.

The Washington Post: Pearls before breakfast (via Digg)

As many of you may be aware, I am a Mac user. Luckily, I don't need to use Windows in a daily basis, but I am not a Mac zealot, and while I almost never use Windows, I don't feel the urge to criticize Microsoft products just for the sake of mocking them.

So, I have been testing Windows Vista lately, using Parallels under Mac. I'll start by saying that the performance of Vista under Parallels (with 512Megs of RAM associated to it) is quite astonishing, and it even works better than XP. I have to say, though, that the main task I run on Windows is Internet Explorer, to see how a new web design looks and (almost everytime) patch it for IE, so the load is quite low.

As a mere curiosity, Windows thinks I have a Core Duo at 2GHz running at 7GHz, which is probably due to the fact it's running under Parallels, but curious anyway. Way to go, Intel!


One of the things that most people are complaining about Vista is the famous Cancel or Allow dialog, as in the You're having a sad realization, cancel or allow? ad by Apple. I must say that is completely true. I got 4 (yes, FOUR) Cancel or Allow dialogs when I installed the Parallels Tools, but the most hilarious one was in Internet Explorer, when I right-clicked and chose View Source Code. I mean, for Notepad? What harm may poor Notepad cause?


That's why I ask myself if you are using Vista or you are letting Vista use your computer. You never know.
As for the overall design, I must say it's not that bad. For instance, the Explorer has been redesigned, resembling MacOS X Finder. All windows have this Mac-alike brushed style.

Today I stumbled upon (via Igor's blog) a quite interesting and strange bunch of questions that are supposed to be useful to decide if someone will be a good consultant. I must say I only got right questions 2 and 3. Post your results in a comment if you want to.

Q1. How do you put a giraffe into a refrigerator?

The correct answer is: Open the refrigerator, put in the giraffe, and close the door.

This question tests whether you tend to do simple things in an overly complicated way.

Q2. How do you put an elephant into a refrigerator?

Did you say, Open the refigerator, put in the elephant and close the refrigerator?

Wrong Answer

Correct Answer: Open the refrigerator, take out the giraffe, put in the elephant and close the door.

This tests your ability to think through the repercussions of your previous actions.

Q3. The Lion King is hosting an animal conference. All the animals attend… except one. Which animal does not attend?

Correct Answer: The elephant. The elephant is in the refrigerator.

You were the one who just stuffed the elephant into the refrigerator.

This tests your memory.

Okay, even if you did not answer the first three questions correctly, you still have one more chance to show your true analytical abilities.

Q4. There is a river you must cross but it is used by crocodiles, and you do not have a boat. How do you manage it?

Correct Answer: You jump into the river and swim across. Have you not been listening? All the crocodiles are attending the Animal Meeting.

This tests whether you learn quickly from your mistakes.


According to a consulting firm using this test, approximately 90% of the professionals tested answered incorrectly but many preschoolers answered several answers correctly.

One conjecture: most professionals don’t have the analytical powers of a four-year-old.