Come explore familiar and unexpected views of the microscopic world with these beautifully colorized images from electron microscopes at MicroAngela.

In the 1940s, a lot of superheroes gained their powers through some mystical artifact from the Far East; in the 1960s, they got them through radioactivity; and, since the 1990s, they get them through genetic engineering. It's interesting to see the connections between comic superheroes and physics. For a sampling, see the following sites :

• Comics references to the elements are gathered in this periodic table of comic books.


• The Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics Web site rates the accuracy of physics in popular films.


• BadAstronomy does the same for astronomy.


• Larry Gonick pens cartoons to explain scientific concepts including special relativity and protein folding.

SETI is a scientific project using large telescopes in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. On August 15, 1977 the Ohio State Radio Observatory detected the most promising extraterrestrial candidate signal to date. The so-called "Wow!" signal received its name from the note written in the margin of the computer printout by Dr. Jerry Ehman. The signal rises about 15 dB above the mean background noise, in a single channel.

An analysis of the Wow! signal indicates that its source was moving with the background stars. From its Doppler shift signature, terrestrial interference, aircraft, and spacecraft can be ruled out as possible origins of the signal. The antenna coordinates indicated that the signal was coming from no known nearby solar-type stars. The only condition required for a SETI signal not met was that of repeatability. However, since the Ohio State Big Ear radiotelescope has an extremely narror beamwidth, viewing just one part in a million of the sky at any given time, one would not expect the signal to repeat. Assuming the Wow! signal is a typical SETI-like transmission, then we can expect valid SETI hits to be very strong, high intermittent signals which appear once (as the transit beam sweeps past Earth), and never repeat again. Unless the signal is detected again, we may never know for sure.

Damn. I lost an hour again by browsing the beautiful Periodic Table Table.

Remember my One day post, which I also posted in the Monastery?



One day...
you don't want to join 5 meetings and receive 20 emails just to add one page on the website.
you're finally fed up with Redmondware.
you realize your cosy and well paid job is a dead end road.


One day you decide to quit.


It's over. I'm leaving Dexia to become a Unix specialist at KBC.

I have done good things at Dexia : I helped develop Net Banking, activated the thing on Linux, Mozilla and Mac OSX, and helped it transform from an unstable webapplication to a rock solid framework for building other applications.
Yes, I have done good things at Dexia.

Time to do great things at KBC.

"To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."
-- Carl Sagan


22 years ago, 13 hours of television changed my life. I was just 10 years old when I saw Cosmos for the first time. Carl Sagan's explanation of the "Billions and Billions" of stars in our universe was often heckled, but I always related to the wonder of the magnitude that he was trying to relate. Vangelis was responsible for the soundtrack (the same guy behind the music from Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner), and thinking back at it today, I feel the stirrings of emotion that brought me running to Science at an early age.


If you're looking for a gift for a child in your life this holiday season, I suggest the DVD Compilation. Make sure to buy it from the carlsagan.com site, as 10% of the proceeds go to the Carl Sagan Foundation.
I recently bought the DVD compilation from carlsagan.com, and I must say that I'm not dissapointed : great show, great music.

For some days I'm busy porting Dexia's NetBanking to Mac OSX, the all-singing-all-dancing Unix-with-a-GUI. Today I finally managed to get the core of NetBanking working. It took only some days of twiddling with the code, just hindered by the fact that there's no VisualAge for Java available for Mac OSX. But this thing just shows how rock solid the whole NetBanking architecture is built.


And gosh, do I like this Java2 stuff in Apple. No more MRJ crap, just plain Sun Java. Internet Explorer and Mozilla working in one strike, God, this is the way how Java was meant to be.




For all you Macheads, Dexia's NetBanking will be available in December 2002 on your Mac OSX. No fscking module anymore, just a simple applet in your browser !

After reading a post about making your own Albert Heyn bonus cards, I search a bit around, and quickly discovered barcode (duh), a Unix command line program, which makes barcodes of an excellent quality (in PostScript).

Most barcodes on items here in Europe, are in EAN-13 code, which you find explained here. The first 2 or 3 characters are used for country codes. For example, Belgian manufactured goods are labelled with a barcode beginning with 54.

The dog brought a bug inside the house, which I now can identify as a Green Shield Bug, thanks to Hania's and Hans' pages on the garden animals (also available in Dutch). The nicely illustrated site gives an amazing overview of what little monsters are living in the Western European back yards.

Imagine that we are beyond the energy crisis, in that we are used to paying double or triple prices for what in the previous century was a small part of the family budget. Now we are faced with a new shortage that taps another precious resource : water only comes through the tap fours hours a day and we are forced to pay ten to hundred times what we paid in the 90s.

Welcome to the world of privatized water, where fresh water is treated like a commodity, traded and sold in the international market to the highest bidder. No longer can you assume a God-given right to drink from a mountain spring. Instead you will have to pay a toll to drink from Enron Springs, Monsanto Wells or receive tap water from Bechtel Water Works.

I encountered the Monsanto name in Mr McDougall's rant about America. Most people already know about the enormous powers some chemical multinationals have, and how it may well be that they are the real institutions who rule world politics.

Global consumption of water is doubling every 20 years, more than twice the rate of human population growth. According to the United Nations, more than one billion people already lack access to fresh drinking water. If current trends persist, by 2025 the demand for fresh water is expected to rise by 56 percent more than the amount of water that is currently available. Multinational corporations recognize these trends and are trying to monopolize water supplies around the world. Monsanto, Bechtel, and other global multinationals are seeking control of world water systems and supplies.