RIP Peter Steele

http://twitter.com/trent_reznor/status/12243398078

http://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+type+o+negative&hl=it&lr=&client=firefox-a&hs=GZX&rls=org.mozilla:it:official&source=univ&tbs=vid:1&tbo=u&ei=LnPSS7CJEM6GkAXcxpG8DA&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CBoQqwQwAw

GOCE launch

Wow, GOCE was launched, finally!

NIN prevail in 2008 Amazon MP3 sales charts

The NIN album Ghosts I-IV is the bestselling MP3 album of 2008 at Amazon.com.

Q.E.D.

See here for more details.

Sass da la Prea

In the woods outside the small town where I grew up (Cagno, in the province of Como, Italy) there is a gigantic erratic boulder named Sass da la Prea. Because of its particular shape (it seems to be standing) it has always been considered a sort of “natural totem” by the people of the town and it has been a frequent destination for short trips in the woods.

Some weeks ago I decided to try to reach it again, so I went back to the places of my childhood with my girlfriend and we set off for a small journey. It was a nightmare. The footpath has been almost completely canceled by the vegetation and the torrent downstream now resembles more a swamp than the nice water stream I recalled from my memories.

The boulder itself was difficult to be seen, despite its height of more than ten meters, because it has been almost completely covered by the vegetation.

(check the photos: on the left the boulder more than twenty years ago, on the center the boulder nearly ten years ago, on the right the boulder now – they were taken in different seasons, but I think that the change can be noticed nevertheless).

Sass da la Prea many years ago

Sass da la Prea a few years ago

Sass da la Prea nowadays

Today people don’t live the woods as they did just ten years ago (at least in the area where I live). We are more and more likely to stay at home, pampered by our technological gadgets, confined in our urban areas and forgetting the beauty of the natural places that surround us.

Needless to say, something like Sass da la Prea was a sort of ‘characterization’ of the areas around it and a reference for the people who knew and visited it. Now most of the inhabitants of the towns around the boulder probably forgot it and, if not, they simply think it’s not that important. We are slowly flattening our diversities and loosing the uniqueness of folks and places.

Edit: some new photos taken by Ivan can be seen here: http://fotoalbum.alice.it/lafucina/sass-dela-prea-cagno/

New nin album released for free

Trent is not giving up with his ideas about how modern music distribution should be.

Yesterday nine inch nails released (under a Creative Commons license) their new album “the slip” by letting people download it for free in a variety of formats from their website:

“Click HERE to get the new full-length nine inch nails record: the slip

(thank you for your continued and loyal support over the years – this one’s on me)”

The formats that require more bandwidth have been published via BitTorrent (I’m seeding it since yesterday: 3946 seeders and 519 leechers at this moment).

On Digg the related piece of news has climbed the lists of most popular diggs and now it has already reached the top of the most dug news during this week (7928 and counting at this moment).

The pillars that sustain the traditional (bloated) music industry are cracking…

Iranian beauty

Many photos on this site left me speechless… for example:

Chahar Bagh in Iran.

Robin Finck is back

Good to see that Robin Finck is back working with Trent…

Battlestar Galactica – 4th Season

Wow! The 4th season of Battlestar Galactica blasted off yesterday evening! I hope it will be as good as the previous ones (this is the only television program I really LOVE… and the only one I actually watch).

“Battlestar Galactica” Top Ten List (youtube)

slaxGIS v080402

Two days ago we released a new version of slaxGIS, the customized SLAX distribution that we develop and use at Laboratorio di Geomatica. It is a GIS-oriented live USB GNU/Linux distribution that includes:

• GRASS 6.3.0 RC6
• MapServer 5.0.2
• Chameleon 2.6.0 RC1
• uDig 1.1 RC14
• OpenJUMP PIROL Edition 1.2B
• PostgreSQL 8.3.1
• PostGIS 1.3.2
• … and other software packages needed by the ones above

We find it very useful for both research and didactics, since it is much faster than a live CD or DVD and it is able to save all changes directly on the USB key filesystem. It can also be used for PC recovery purposes, since it automatically mounts all the hard drives found on the hosting machine.

Megalith map

The people at Megalithic Portal and Megalithia have developed this MapServer-based online map to georeference and share information about megaliths and related monuments. The database is very rich and new content can be uploaded to improve it.

I think that collaborative online work such as this portal will be more and more used in the future to collect, check and share large amounts of data, also for scientific purposes. For example I’ve been thinking of implementing a webgis similar to this one to produce a database of sardinian nuraghes (I’ve been studying the intervisibility among these monuments but the available databases are poor, and since the number of nuraghes is around 8000 units – often located within private properties – it’s very difficult to carry out complete analyses on them). Perhaps I will find some spare time this summer, who knows!