Ivan's weblog

Chili’s World, by my friend Santiago Casares, is now in its fourth season! Don’t miss the adventures of Chili, the shy penguin looking for love, Lenny, the lemming with philosophical issues, Mac the cat, and Alice! Here’s one of my favorites so far:

You have to see it to believe it: http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2005/09/satanic-tomato.asp.

Episode IV (or currently about half of it), as animated ASCII, via telnet:
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

Added: originally available as a Java applet, at http://www.asciimation.co.nz/.

Take a look at this comic strip: http://www.ozyandmillie.org/2005/om20050823.html

Skateboarder clears Great Wall of China.

Pretty entertaining list from the American Film Institute. At the top we have “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” (Gone with the Wind), followed by “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.” (The Godfather).

Scientists research questions few would ask

The proliferation of scientific journals and meetings makes it possible to publish or present papers whose conclusion inspires less “Wow! Who would have guessed?” and more “For this you got a Ph.D.?”

Thanks to Anastassia, an incoming postdoc in our lab, now I know how to transliterate “Tubert” to the Cyrillic alphabet: “туберт". Today I found 71 results in Google. So there might be some Tuberts in Russia, but I’d have to decipher the pages first…

A couple of weeks ago I went to Barcelona (see pictures) to visit my friend Christian and a few other fellas who live there. I took the opportunity to go to Mas Tubert, a house for rural tourism in El Ripollès, a couple of hours from Barcelona. I expected to find distant cousins there, but alas, they told me that I was a bit late–the last time someone with the Tubert name lived in that house was in 1866. But I also learned that the house is there and belonged to a Tubert at least as early as 1675. The story is told in Columbaris: El Colomer de la Vall de Bianya (Segles XIII-XX) by Antoni Herrero. Here I show a picture of one page:

And here is a picture from the house itself, from the keystone of the arch above the main door:

Many people in Barcelona and in El Tubert told me that they were pretty sure that Tubert is a Catalan name. I’ve decided to investigate by using the white pages, which are available online. What follows is a list of the number of Tuberts found for each province in Spain and département in France, sorted by decreasing frequency. Notice how the Tuberts are heavily concentrated in Girona and Pyrénées-Orientales. So it appears that the Tubert name comes from the Eastern Pyrenees region between France and Spain, although even there it is not a very common name. The question now is, how did some Tuberts ended up moving to Russia and from there to Argentina? I suspect that Napoleon may be involved somehow.

Spain

(Note: this count includes matches for both the father’s family name and the mother’s family name, so the count is overestimated by a factor of two relative to the French data below).

France

Very interesting interview about the crazy ways in which copyright laws are being used against creativity and innovation. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/policy/2005/02/24/lessig.html

I was in Washington just before the Iraq war began and was invited to speak to groups of senators of both parties. The most obvious distinction between the Democrats and the Republicans was that the Republicans used exclusively religious language.
[…]
Now I come back to Britain and discover another kind of “anschluss” of liberal values in the face of resurgent religious demands. It seems we need to fight the battle for the Enlightenment all over again in Europe too.

http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=603426

I found this funny picture while doing ego surfing on Google Images. It seems it’s a house (or maybe a tiny town?) in Spain.

I just set up this blog two days ago and I’m already receiving blog spam!. Today I got about two dozen “comments” with links to dubious casinos…

As a result, and thanks to the links provided by Alán, I decided to install a Captcha system to try to detract the spambots. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Well, this is my first post. Seems to be working…