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Archive for April, 2003

A diet for engineers

Would you ever compare a diet with a negative-feedback system? John Walker, founder of Autodesk and co-author of AutoCAD, thinks overweight problems can be easily faced by studying their transfer function and solving them as traditional engineering systems. He does even provide a bunch of computer tools that will help you track your weight loss on a daily basis from an engineering point of view.

My favorite quote: There is a difference between eating a varied diet and chowing down on a cup of lard and sugar once a day. Programmers know this instinctively: they balance their daily menu among the four major food groups: caffeine, sugar, grease, and salt. It’s very worrying that I feel identified with all these…

Add comment April 14th, 2003

What floor are you going to?

The first lift of the so called space elevator has already been planned. On July 1st, 2018 an elevator guided by a thin cable (some centimeters thick) and built by LiftPort will go up to 15000 kilometers away from the Earth.

The main benefit of this would be inexpensive delivery of satellites to space. What is more interesting to me is that it will supposedly make space trips affordable for almost everyone.

Not surprisingly, there is already someone making profit out of this. You can read more on space elevators at how stuff works.

Add comment April 13th, 2003

Folding@Home

Folding@Home is a distributed computing project aimed at understanding the process of protein folding. This will allow to find cures for diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. If you have ever considered to donate your unusued CPU time, this is obviously one of the best ideas.

2 comments April 7th, 2003

Calatrava

I don’t know much about architecture, but I can’t stop admiring Calatrava’s works, some of which include the Alamillo bridge in Sevilla, some auditoriums in Valencia (his birthplace), the Art museum in Milwaukee and the Pavillion in Basilea. I’m now looking for a flat and I wish I could find something like the Turning Torso. It is an awesome skyscraper for residential use designed by Calatrava and being built in the Swedish city of Malmö.

4 comments April 6th, 2003

Retrospective

The photos from Paris are now online. Overally, it’s one of my favorite cities in western Europe (as far as I’ve seen). If you want to know what’s on Paris, buy a Pariscope for a few cents. However, you won’t need any guidebook to be sure that you should see at least: the Mona Lisa and much more at Le Louvre, the astonishing Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame and Moulin Rouge. If you like science you must also see Foucault’s pendulum, and you’ll have no doubt that the Earth rotates on its axis. Of course, this is a tiny list for what you can actually see and do in Paris. So many things that you’ll often collapse, sit down for a while and see the world go by.

The complete photo gallery is here. Don’t forget to check this original desktop background By the way, Dublin is also online!

2 comments April 4th, 2003

Nabab

So, very appropriately, I came back to work on April’s fool. Paris was great. I made approx one hundred photos in four days, which is below my average anyway. Will upload them very shortly, promise. And to make your mouth water, I’m gonna start with a very tasty pick: a Pakistani-Indian restaurant called Nabab and located at rue des Trois Freres. If you like curry, this is the perfect place to enjoy a relaxed dinner in Paris. Especially recommendable are the chicken vindaloo and the lamb makhani, both accompanied with oriental fried rice and garlic nan.

p.s. All power corrupts, but we need electricity.

2 comments April 1st, 2003