Scott Adams (author of Dilbert strips) can speak again (via Slashdot). 18 months ago he lost his voice for a Spasmodic Dysphonia. His blogpost about this story is really moving.
He explain how he could talk to crowd but not to small groups or in his family. He could sing instead of normally speaking. Very interesting for people curious on how the brain works.
I filled the questionnaire for the survey of the future of Switzerlan, on the website of Prospettiva Svizzera. Some questions on how people see the future in Switzerland and how they would like to decide on some themes.
Interesting thing, I’d like to know results. I wonder if I really can do the survey again.
As every survey, sometimes I can’t find the right answer among the different possibilities.
A post by the Maestrina on the future of television. According to her, in 10 years the television world (and market) will completely change.
In next 2-3 years, the networks will put shows’ trailer on social network, then will sell shows on their websites. Before 2010 they will distribute shows for free, with advertising. But removing adv from a file is easy, so they will produce context-branded shows.
After 2010 the whole movies+shows online market is organized through folksnomies and freely available for download. Payment is done thanks to a internet access tax (10$ per year). In 2012 the traditional formats of movie, shows, series and so on is subverted by popular production.
In 2015 the Next Big Thing will change everything again.
Someone seems not to agree: the DRM systems may be used to prevent access to contents for citizen of a certain country. If you are Italian and you’d like to buy and watch a movie in a US hotel, you can’t, because your credit card refers to an italian account and the licence of the product you’re buying does not allow you to watch the movie.
Some days ago I read about Stanislav Petrov. In 1983, he did not react to a (wrong) red alert given by the russian radar system. He save the world from a nuclear war.
I don’t remember if the media spoke about the incident. Maybe nobody talk to me: I was nine and scared by the Bomb (don’t remember exactly why). During the high-school, I studied the Cold War (it was 1992-3). Still nobody told me about him. Actually, I did never hear anything on him. I think this is a fault by our school and media systems.
I’m quite impressed by this list too: 20 Mishaps That Might Have Started Accidental Nuclear War.
Do you need to synchronize Outlook, Google Calendar, Gmail, iPod and other tools? Chris Pirillo links to ScheduleWorld and explains how to use it.
Bruno talks about the Google Foundation and the Google.org thing. One of the project is a car than can run 42 km with one liter. Google and the internet are something new. 15 years ago, nobody could preview their success. Now Google can enter the car+oil market and rewrite the rule of it.
On Sunday, September 3., I was in Lodrino, a small village some kilometers before the Gotthard. The Lodrino Airshow 2006 was really wonderful, but in my opinion the best airshow in this area is the Ambri Airshow. Well, was. The Lugano Airshow is good, but an airshow in the mountains is really different.
In Lodrino you had the sun in your eyes for the whole afternoon. Very bad. Ambri is a better place for an airshow.
If you like this kind of shows, have a look at my photo-set in flickr.
It seems that www.acm.org is now hacked:
The Guardian has a story on 15 websites that changed the world.
Here’s the list:
Here you’ll see how everything started, 15 years ago (6 August 1991): the copy of the first website of history. It changed the world in a very short time.
I’d like to add some websites that are not on the list:
Update: Massimo notes that this article on Repubblica is very similar to Guardian’s article.
Via Slashdot, a very short history of Graphical User Interface: 10 years of Mac and Windows desktops.
Panorama (10 August 2006) publishes a little article where it is stated that swiss people “stole” italian buildings. It seems that Italy built some village, schools and hospitals in Sri Lanka, after the tsunami in 2004. According to the italian magazine, in the village of Jaya Sayaurupura, swiss people of GUS (maybe DSC?) and journalists put shields “made in Switzerland” on italian buildings, but actually they gave “only” 1000 euros per family.
Sonogno is a beautiful village in Valle Verzasca. I spent an afternoon there, walking to the falls. Very relaxing and nice day. You’ll find some more photos on my flickr page.
I spent two days in Bogno, not far from Lugano (half an hour with my car). Beautiful mountains and a little of fresh air for a two-days seminar on my work. I learned a lot of things, simply thinking together with my colleagues on what we did in the past. If you’d like to spend some days in a quite village, have a look at the local hotel: the Locanda San Lucio.
I read an article in italian, about one month ago: Dimmi dove abiti, ti dirò quanto guadagni (Swissinfo). It says that in Zürich the mean salary is CHF 5984 (2004). In Ticino it is CHF 4823. Lot of difference. This was confirmed to me some months ago by a collegue in Economics Departement at the University of Lugano: the difference is about 30%.
And life cost? I’m very skeptic that in Zürich life costs 30% more than in Ticino. I lived there, I know that Migros and Coop have the same prices. Restaurants and cinemas they cost a little more. Flats cost more, but public transportation costs less (and it works, so you spare time and car’s costs).
If you’d like to know better a pilot of the formula Ferrari Challenge, please visit this site.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
