Inquisition Pope? No thanks

Posted on January 15th, 2008 in Freedom & Rights, History, Italy by michele

Pope Benedict (the-Pope-formerly-known-as-Ratzinger) has been invited to the opening of the new academic year at La Sapienza University in Rome. Many professors protested in writing against him being invited, and lot of students are protesting as well. You may think that the Pope is just not popular in that university, but I’d say there is more.

I guess you’ve probably heard about Galileo Galilei, the great scientist known as the Father of Scientific Method. Another smart guy named Albert Einstein (I’m sure you heard about him, at least! :-) ) even called him the Father of Modern Science.

Galileo

Galileo had to stand trial on suspicion of heresy in 1633, and lived under house arrest until he died in 1642. His fault was to assert that the Earth was moving around the Sun, and not the other way around as the Catholic Church said.

That was Inquisition time.

Well, maybe it still is.

In 1990 the-Pope-formerly-known-as-Ratzinger said “In Galileo’s time, the Church sided much more with reason than he did. The trial was reasonable and fair”.

I beg your pardon ?!?!

Is it that surprising that professors and students don’t want him around ?

State of Fear - Michael Crichton

Posted on January 6th, 2008 in Books, Freedom & Rights by michele

State of Fear - Earth

I really enjoyed this book, especially after the delusion of Next. I liked State of Fear from two different standpoints:

First. It’s an intriguing fiction story, couldn’t stop reading it. Page-turner alert! :-)

Second. As a non fiction book it stimulates you to think with your own brain, to verify facts. It urges you not to assume that something is true just because magazines and TV shows keep talking about it. The topic here is global warming, and a lot of scientific references are given for the reader that wants to get a better idea (I’ve not checked any of them yet!). The non-fiction Appendix about politicized science reminds you that history already told us that facts and not magazines should drive us.

I found almost the same considerations several months ago (again about global warming) in Dancing Naked in the Mind Field by Kary Mullis, and I was equally impressed.

I also found most appropriate the State of Fear’s definition given at some point in the book:

“Politicians need fears to control population.
Lawyers need dangers to litigate, and make money.
The media need scare stories to capture an audience.”

And after the end of the Cold War several new fears have been fed to us…

PS: you may find interesting Michael Crichton’s speech The case for skepticism on global warming and counterarguments to State of Fear on RealClimate blog.

Human Tetris performance - Wanna play ?

Posted on January 4th, 2008 in Art, Brain, Funny, Technology by michele

Early computer games didn’t have graphics, and the first ones to have it would feature a very poor screen resolution by today’ standard. Such a low resolution, so few pixels that a theatre could have enough seats to be a game “screen”. If this is the case, each pixel is a person.

And how would a Tetris game look like? Guillaume Reymond, with his GAME OVER Project, realized Tetris and several other games, here’s how it looks like:

Genius. Pure genius.

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