tlog

The space shuttle always plays the leading part in its videos, but in the following NASA edited together some surprising videos focused on the “side men” :

STS-129: Atlantis Solid Rocket Booster [via Miro]

Did you hear that too, while watching ?

:)

An interlude to failed conceptual photos…

Saint-Malo from the walls

There’s a strange pattern appearing in the number of visits on my blog, that does not seem to be linked with my posts. It can be seen in the image below — where I’ve voluntarily removed the scale for the (pathetic) number of views. Suffices to say that the highest point is a 10x jump in visitors¹.

The paper effect

By checking what are  the pages viewed in such occasions, I’ve realized that it’s mostly all about my LaTeX page². So, my nice visitors are very likely to be writing scientific papers, report or visual presentation³ at those times.

But a mystery remains as I’m still unable to explain the full pattern: the jumps seem to be regularly set. The red ones are on tuesday/wednesday (is that a late student I see working on his presentation until wednesday morning when he/she has to defend his/her project ?) and the orange ones are on tuesday/friday (a paper to submit on friday I guess… and f**king late as far as I can tell)…

Anyway, for those of you who are struggling to get your papers perfect, don’t forget the awesome advices from PhDComics:

1. which sums up to not that much actually:) [↩]
2. which, now I think of it, is still not translated to english :S [↩]
3. and most probably not doing so in english… [↩]

Along with New-Zealand and Ireland France has to face the “graduated response” bill project and may well try a black-out action too. Not sure of what the music and film industry will gain by fighting their customers with such rage…

According to the Springer GTM test I’m algebraic geometry. TO be honest that’s a pretty good guess for such a short test.

If I were a Springer-Verlag Graduate Text in Mathematics, I would be Robin Hartshorne’s Algebraic Geometry. My creator studied algebraic geometry with Oscar Zariski and David Mumford at Harvard, and with J.-P. Serre and A. Grothendieck in Paris. After receiving his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1963, he became a Junior Fellow at Harvard, then taught there for several years. In 1972 he moved to California where he is now Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. My siblings include “Residues and Duality” (1966), “Foundations of Projective Geometry (1968), “Ample Subvarieties of Algebraic Varieties” (1970), and numerous research titles. My creator’s current research interest is the geometry of projective varieties and vector bundles. He has been a visiting professor at the College de France and at Kyoto University, where he gave lectures in French and in Japanese, respectively. My creator is married to Edie Churchill, educator and psychotherapist, and has two human sons and one daughter. He has travelled widely, speaks several foreign languages, and is an experienced mountain climber. He is also an accomplished musician, playing flute, piano, and traditional Japanese music on the shakuhachi. Which Springer GTM would you be? The Springer GTM Test

Via this blog.

A new level of paranoia :)

Funny bug from Google...

Good to see that the French Ministry of Defense reacted quickly[fr] to an actual terror plot, even if it did by reading a blog post.

Seems like  US govt was aware of that and silently watched !

Anyway next time somebody elaborates an international plot, they’d better find a better camouflage…