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Today is World book and copyright day. UN mentions a lot about books and the diversity of values they bring along but very few words are written on copyright per se. It’s true that books are vectors of values and knowledge, depositories of the intangible heritage. But in a world progressively going towards digital books, it could be worth having a real debate about what type of knowledge we want to preserve for the next generations, in which formats, under what types of conditions. ...

It all started with a strong statement in the LA Times: If early humans had been vegans we might all still be living in caves. It says nothing and everything at the same time … Not eating meat would have stopped our “evolution” from early humans? Not eating meat would make us dumber? Or does it have something else to do? It does. ...

On March 14th, 2012 (3/14/2012), it was Pi day. According to Wikipedia, Pi (π) is a mathematical constant that is the ratio of any Euclidean circle’s circumference to its diameter. While others estimated π using Monte Carlo in R or declared π is wrong, I tried to see how many times the pi value is cited in Pubmed, a database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. And here are the results (please note the log y-axis): ...

March 7th, 2012 is Holi! It is first a Hindu spring festival celebration but it is also known as the festival of colours. The main day is celebrated by people throwing scented powder and perfume at each other. Bonfires are lit on the eve of the festival ( more info on Wikipedia). Now compare how a movie showed Holi in 1981 (" Silsila"): [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZNTbobkg-I] With a movie showing a Holi celebration in 2010 (" Action_Replayy"): ...

A Java project compilation went berserk and I ended up with a directory structure of more than 260 characters. I stopped the mad process but it already created more than 50 successive duo of path “build/classes” … Now I had to delete this structure. And, to my surprise, it was impossible. When you try to just press the “Delete” key with the root directory selected in the File Explorer, you get a Path Too Long exception. The reason is that the maximum length of a path according to the Windows API (MAX_PATH variable) is defined as 260 characters. I tried some other methods but all of them failed: ...

This afternoon I received a bunch of data accompanied by stacked bar graphs for each dataset. For example, this one: The chart shows the incidence of disease X in various age ranges. That incidence is split by 8 severity levels. The chart shows that the disease especially affects age ranges 4 and 5, at different severity levels. However I didn’t feel comfortable … what are the different levels of severity in age ranges 1, 2 and 3? how can we compare levels C, D and E in age ranges 4 and 5? is there anywhere some severity A? (it’s even worst when some age ranges don’t have any incidence at all: what is happening?) etc. I looked on the web but couldn’t find much information apart from the fact " The Economist says they’re so bad at conveying information, that they’re a great way to hide a bad number amongst good ones" (but are still using them in their graphic detail section) or " a stacked column chart with percentages should always extend to 100%" (this doesn’t really apply here). Then in a post on Junk Charts, someone mentioned Steven Few who would have said “not to use stacked bar charts because you cannot compare individual values very easily and as a rule [he] avoid[s] stacked bars with more than six or seven divisions”. And Steven Few also participated in his forum here. ...

For some reasons, I had to choose between a new, simple Nokia phone (but fortunately not a Windows one!) and my 1-year-old Android phone. Before I leave this Android phone, here are the few 6 Android apps that I really appreciated and used daily. FBReader is a very nice e-book reader for Android. It supports a lot of e-book formats like epub, fb2, (partially) mobipocket, html, RTF and plain text. It works very well with Calibre (a free software e-book reader / manager / converter) - or is it the opposite? I also really like the fact FBReader can browse and download some free e-books directly from the internet. Of course, reading an e-book on a small 3.2 inch screen isn’t the perfect user experience. However, the night mode (white text on black background) is very handy to read something when it’s late and you don’t want the harsh white background. You can find FBReader on the Android Market for free (it’s a free software, under the GPL). ...

In three days (Jan 23rd, 2012) it will be the Vietnamese Tết. This year is the year of the Dragon. Happy New Year! For those interested there will be a celebration at Théâtre Marni in Brussels on January 28th afternoon. And BelVietnam is mentioning three celebrations in Brussels on January 21st, 29th and February 12th. Photo credit: Dragon boats resting on Sông Hương river, Huế, Vietnam (from my photos on Flickr, licence CC-by-sa)

Yesterday, GOOD issued an infographic of America’s Aging Workforce (reproduced below). One of the key learning I take from it is that many Americans are unprepared for retirement. Indeed, the average American worker has saved $25,000 for retirement but it is estimated she/he will need $350,000 if she/he wishes to retire at 65 (i.e. 14 times more money!). I was also wondering: after China and Belgium, how will the population age in the USA? ...

Indeed: 2011 was the International Year of Chemistry (IYC). But why IUPAC and UNESCO dedicated a year to that basic science? It was for two reasons: one looking at the past and one looking at the future. Looking at the past, 2011 was the 100th anniversary of Marie Curie’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her discovery of the elements radium and polonium. She was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize. And her discovery was very important for both the science in itself and its applications to health. Radium’s radioactivity seemed to contradict the principle of the conservation of energy. The discovery of radium allowed other great names in chemistry and physics like Rutherford to study the atom and radioactivity decay. In medicine, the radioactivity of radium allowed the development of radiation therapies, used to control or kill malignant cells in cancer treatment. ...