O Crominho do Técnico



Bruno Afonso's babbling and seldom refreshed views of the world

Famous last tweet: Wish I was in Barcelona. I mean, at the embo meeting in Barcelona...

Tag: Science

Portugal’s clean energy efforts

The New York Times has an article on Portugal’s use of renewable sources. The most striking thing on the article is the following graph: Besides Iceland, which will show no increase in their renewable energy source share, Portugal is only behind Denmark in Europe. This is great news for Portugal as long as big profitable [...]

Picture of the day

I bet you did not expect that :-)

Carboxysomes organization paper is out!

For those of you interested in reading the full version of the article and do not happen to have access here’s the PDF. I will write a bit more about it when I have some time!

Remembering friends

Due to my computer abilities I have been appointed the lab’s internal IT manager. It basically entails nothing with the exception of communicating to the real IT people what the lab needs or fixing up some code in our PHP system for ordering and some databases. One of my duties is to administer the mailing [...]

Opposite of Education

This attitude towards testing plays into everything that – educationally speaking – makes Americans feel embarrassed about themselves. On first hearing Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn, the usual response of a young American is not to swoon, weep or ponder whether beauty is really truth, and truth beauty. It is to ask: “Will that [...]

Writing English as a Second Language

The American Scholar has an article by William Zinsser’s on how to write English as a second language. You have no idea of how blessed you are if you stumble upon this article early in your writing career. Good luck to you all indeed.

Lots of data

Holy shit, that’s a lot of data (read, work). In case you’re interested, you can read the paper here (it’s free!).

Graphs, plots, et al

Maybe a bit too late this far along in my grad school experience, but I’d just like to share that I’ve been reading on my spare (cough, cough) lab time The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. I truly recommend this book for anyone dealing with quantitative data and that cares about presenting it in papers [...]

A visão de Sarah Palin

A Sarah Palin tem um artigo de opinião no Washington Post que remata da seguinte forma: In his inaugural address, President Obama declared his intention to “restore science to its rightful place.” But instead of staying home from Copenhagen and sending a message that the United States will not be a party to fraudulent scientific [...]

Quo Vadis Portugal Economy?

O NYT tem um artigo interessante intitulado “Banking on a Ph.D. ‘Ecosystem’ to Drive New Economies“. O artigo refere as dificuldades de países onde não existem Silicon Valleys – considerado um local com características únicas no mundo – conseguirem aliar um alto nível de educação com empreendorismo. A certa altura, o artigo refere: Translating research [...]