ARTEFACTO A PLACE WHERE TO START – By Adrian Palacios

2010

I guess we all agree we won't be going to Jupiter this year either. But we can always be excited about yet another phone.

I love it when a plan comes together

This is the first official picture of the new film based on the American Action television series the A Team. The very famous four characters created by Stephen J. Cannel, who literally invaded our TVs on the 80s during 98 episodes, are now brought the the cinema by the independent Joe Carnahan (Smoking Aces) - who by the way was offered to direct Mission Impossible III but rejected it -

The actors, who will bring this new production to life by representing a group of ex-United State Special Forces being on the run from the military for crime the didn't commit, are Liam Neeson as Hannibal, Sharlto Copley as Murdock, Quinton Rampage Jackson as M.A Baracus and Bradly Cooper as Phoenix.

Global Expenses in perspective

It is always good to pay a visit to Information Is Beautiful. This time areas mean money expenses, earns, gains, fights and loses. Have a look!

XO goes to Uruguay

The OLPC (one laptop per child) project, which initially was targeting India as the first country to adapt it, has shifted direction, and now Uruguay is the first to start a plan by which all primary school students and about 18.000 teachers will get a XO unit.

More Nobel

More in the Nobel price. Barack Obama has been awarded with the Peace Nobel Price for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples". He and me agree on the same, it may be a bit soon for him to stand by such "transformative figures". It is true that his speech involves great changes on foreign policy but those changes hasn't been achieved yet, and it looks they will need long time, as we have been seeing in his attempts for nuclear disarm.

Looking around I found this article which nicely combines two of my previous posts in its title. - Obama's prize: Noble hopes in an ignoble world. Ignoble is the source of the "Ig" in the Ig Nobel Prizes, what The Globe and Mail meant with it: an exercise for the reader :)

Yes to Europe

Based on 37% of the votes, Brian Cowen, Prime Minister equivalent in Ireland, has made public this morning that YES is the answer of Ireland to the Lisbon treaty. This leaves only Poland and Czech Republic as the remaining European countries to go through a referendum in this matter.

While Poland has said that will ratify the document as long as Ireland did, Czech Republic president, Vlacav Klaus, has managed to restart the legal process against the treaty which we all thought it was concluded. If this process reaches June next year we could face an old history again: the British conservative party, which will probably win next elections, may try again to delay the treaty.

Wikiloc

If you like using you legs to walk or cycle you will love Wikiloc, a very comprehensive and easy to use catalogue of trails all over the world.

With more than 3 years on the Internet the website hosts more than 100.000 routes and it's been awarded by National Geographic.

Ig Nobel Prize

For those of you not aware of this version of the Nobel Prize they are a parody of the original prize to 10 achievements that "first make you laugh, and then make you think". These priczs have been always immersed on a sea of controversy since 1991, with very different opinions from the scientific community.

The ceremony is celebrated around October each year and these are this year's results:

• VETERINARY MEDICINE PRIZE: Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson, UK,  for showing that cows who have names give more milk than cows that are nameless.
• PEACE PRIZE: Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl, Switzerland, for determining — by experiment — whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.
• ECONOMICS PRIZE: The directors, executives, and auditors of four Icelandic banks,  for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa — and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy.
• CHEMISTRY PRIZE: Javier Morales, Miguel Apátiga, and Victor M. Castaño of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, for creating diamonds from liquid — specifically from tequila.
• MEDICINE PRIZE: Donald L. Unger, of Thousand Oaks, California, USA, for investigating a possible cause of arthritis of the fingers, by diligently cracking the knuckles of his left hand — but never cracking the knuckles of his right hand — every day for more than sixty (60) years.
• PHYSICS PRIZE: Katherine K. Whitcome of the University of Cincinnati, USA, Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard University, USA, and Liza J. Shapiro of the University of Texas, USA, for analytically determining why pregnant women don't tip over.
• LITERATURE PRIZE: Ireland's police service (An Garda Siochana), for writing and presenting more than fifty traffic tickets to the most frequent driving offender in the country — Prawo Jazdy — whose name in Polish means "Driving License".
• PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE: Elena N. Bodnar, Raphael C. Lee, and Sandra Marijan of Chicago, Illinois, USA, for inventing a brassiere that, in an emergency, can be quickly converted into a pair of gas masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander.
• MATHEMATICS PRIZE: Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank, for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers — from very small to very big — by having his bank print bank notes with denominations ranging from one cent ($.01) to one hundred trillion dollars ($100,000,000,000,000).
• BIOLOGY PRIZE: Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu, and Zhang Guanglei of Kitasato University Graduate School of Medical Sciences in Sagamihara, Japan, for demonstrating that kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90% in mass by using bacteria extracted from the feces of giant pandas.

Controversy pictured

A very informative collection of magazine covers that somehow caused sales, disgrace, apologises or even unemployment.