The Pink Floyd in 1973 published this immortal piece of music.

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then the one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in the relative way, but you’re older
And shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone the song is over, thought I’d something more to say

Home, home again
I like to be here when I can
When I come home cold and tired
It’s good to warm my bones beside the fire

Far away, across the field, tolling on the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
And hear the softly spoken magic spell

So now it’s clear to everybody: the swine flu, aka H1N1, was just a joke.  It was slated as a dangerous pandemic that could kill many people and therefore deserved urgent large-scale vaccination.  Of course, following a suggestion that came directly from World Health Organization (no less) all industrialized nations ordered massive amounts of vaccine doses.  The small club of producers (Novartis, Glaxosmith and Baxter), collected a huge amount of money.  Was it worthwhile?  Was it rational?

First of all let’s compare the aggressiveness of the different kinds of flu.  A normal seasonal flu strain, the one that we see every winter, usually infects 340-1000M humans per year, killing 250-500K of them.  In other words, every day we have on average 1000 deaths from seasonal flu and we don’t see the need to say something about that on national TV.  On the other hand H1N1 so far infected approximately 700M humans killing less than 15K.  This means H1N1 is 20 times less dangerous than normal flu!  By comparison, the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 killed more than 20 million people (1000 times more than H1N1).

Now, one could say this is thanks to the vaccination program, right?  So let’s see what happened to the vaccines.  Distribution officially started in early October and the US so far declared to have distributed approximately 100 million doses.  Still, most Americans declared they will not get their children vaccinated.  In Italy the National Health Ministry bough 24 million doses but so far only one million was used. 184M€ were thrown out of the window.  Many European states are in the same boat with Italy and now are trying to sell-off the doses to the African countries.  So no, it’s not thanks to the vaccine.

But then why did we buy so many doses?  Of course, because the pharmaceutical industry raised a lot of money and they know very well how to use part of that money for political “contributions” and lobbying.   Not all countries are subject to this lobby action.  Some of them are still capable of rational reasoning and to save their taxpayer’s money.

Also, Associate Press on May 20 wrote:

In any case, mass producing a pandemic vaccine would be a gamble, as it would take away manufacturing capacity for the seasonal flu vaccine for the flu that kills up to 500,000 people each year. Some experts have wondered whether the world really needs a vaccine for an illness that so far appears mild.

And think about it: the same happened few years ago with avian flu and SARS and swine flu of 1976.  About the latter, wikipedia says:

The 1976 swine flu outbreak, also known as the swine flu fiasco, or the swine flu debacle, was a strain of H1N1 influenza virus that appeared in 1976. Infections were only detected from January 19 to February 9, and were not found outside Fort Dix. The outbreak is most remembered for the mass immunization that it prompted in the United States. The strain itself killed one person and hospitalized 13. However, side-effects from the vaccine caused five hundred cases of Guillain–Barré syndrome and 25 deaths.

Emphasis is in the original.

Last month I performed Georg Friedrich Händel’s Messiah, together with Coro Polifonico Santo Spirito. This was my second time, first being in 2004.  It is believed that it took Händel just 24 days to compose this impressive oratorio but the vocal score is more than 300 pages long so – after five years – I had to study it again.

Like all great music, Messiah is easy to appreciate for anybody but then, when you have the opportunity to listen more carefully or to spend some time reading the score, you start to also appreciate the sophisticated structure and the musical inventions that lie behind it.  Take for example this famous line from the fifth movement.  The text says Thus saith the Lord of Hosts; Yet once, a little while and I will shake the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and the dry land.  Look at how the word shake is described in music with a sequence of fast vibrating notes, shaking from the bottom up to the Heaven, which is at the top of the line followed by the Earth at the bottom again.

This way of composing is called word painting.  The idea is that you can use music to describe the meaning of the words being sung and Messiah makes extensive use of this technique.  In fact Messiah is one of the examples most used when explaining what word painting is.

Another good example is in the 22nd movement: And with his stripes we’re healed.  The main theme is C A D E with a dissonant interval on the last two notes corresponding on the words his stripes.  If you look better at the notes and try to connect C-E and A-D you will see this is a cross.  Every time the theme kicks in, we can see like a whip hitting the chest of Jesus and cutting through his flesh.  If the conductor wants to highlight this effect even more he can ask the choir to indulge on the consonant group str, making the actual note a little delayed.  Of course after the cross we are healed lies on a rising scale that, like a resurrection, will save us all.

I could go ahead and show you all the tricks I found but at the end of the day they are not important.  The important thing is how beautiful is this music when you listen to it and the warm and powerful feelings it can convey.  After silence what comes closer to express the inexpressible is music.

As much as Larry Gopnik struggles to be a mensch (a serious man, guided by right principles) he’s constantly fed with temptations and mysterious bad events.  He tries his best to keep the family together and live straight, but there’s no end to his tribulations.

Larry is a professor of physics waiting to get promoted to tenured position but the school is getting anonymous letters slandering about him.  One of his students doesn’t know basic math and tries to bribe him for a C.  Instead of studying for the upcoming bar mitzvah, his son stole money to buy marijuana and is caught listening to the Jefferson Airplane during the Yiddish lesson. His daughter only cares about hairdo and also steals money to get a nose job. His brother is a parasite gambler who sleeps on the family sofa and spends most of his time in the toilet writing numbers on a book. His wife just announced – out of the blue – that she wants a divorce because she is now in a relation with a friend of them, the slimy Sy, considered a serious man by the local Jewish community.  The guy living next door tries to steal part of the lawn moving the border.  The attractive lady next door offers him marijuana and opportunity for easy sex.

In growing desperation, tormented by horrific nightmares, Larry seeks help from 3 lawyers and 3 rabbis, but none of them actually can or want to do anything useful.  They basically don’t care or – worse – they tell him non-sense stories about messages coming from God.  At the end of the movie, almost bankrupt, Larry eventually gives up and grants a C to the briber.  Soon after that he gets a call from the doctor: they need to talk immediately about something probably bad, perhaps a cancer?  And that is nothing, because all of a sudden a tornado is going to hit the school in a few minutes, destroying everything, including the American flag.

Unlike previous movies, this time the Cohen brothers decided to talk about their own culture, their heritage, the place in the mid-west where they grew up.  And the Jewish culture in this movie is uneasy, or should I say frightening?  Nobody will help you understand the will and the wrath of HaShem (=God), not even the Kabbalah, and the more you keep straight the more you will receive tribulations that you’ll have to swallow. There is no escape.  If you get on the rooftop you feel safe for a moment and perhaps you believe you eventually found some insight of what is going on around you, but that’s just one more challenge that’s coming.  There are smiles and laughs here and there but most of the movie you feel uneasy about what happens to Larry.

I’m certainly no expert in the Jewish matters as I ignore most of their culture and traditions, but the impression I get from this movie is about a crisis in their religion, struggling to keep up with modern times.  In ancient Poland living straight was so simple, even when you had to confront with dybbuks (=evil ghosts) you immediately knew how to deal with them.  Nowadays staying in touch with HaShem is increasingly difficult.

On the other hand, the resignation that guides Larry as he tries to take on his shoulder and accept all the bad things happening around him, as if they were something sent by God to atone the original sin, reminds me the lack of reaction in the Jewish people while nazis were progressively segregating them, taking possession of their property (just like the guy next door does with the lawn), up to the concentration camps.

Special mention to the first rabbi, interpreted by Simon Helberg, who is Wolowitz in The Big Bang Theory.

A serious man
USA 2009, by Ethan and Joel Cohen, Drama
IMDB 1019452

I recently watched this movie. The plot is about an ex secret agent from Mossad now secretly controlled by the US government to perform illegal actions in defense of the “American lifestyle” and declaring he is OK to kill a few innocents when that is for the good of everybody else.  This bad guy goes crazy for money and escapes control, killing his angel in the Senate and creating an incident with many victims.  The movie hit the theaters in the US on Jun 2001, three months before the twin towers, but of course that’s a mere coincidence, isn’t it?  And oh, one of the bad guys in the movie – the one who dies first – is called Torvalds, is Finnish and is an hacker sought-after by the FBI for the many international computer-related crimes he commited.  Any resemblance to real events and/or to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

The computer-related stuff in this movie is rendered very badly and no amount of geek slang used in the script can make it better.  On the other hand Halle Berry is astounding – she is the one who makes the movie worthwhile.

Swordfish
USA 2001, by Dominic Sena, Thriller
IMDB 244244

Wow! In this post I described a strange spice that a Shilpa brought me from India some months ago.  Back there I didn’t know much about it, just that it’s good with tea. In fact I didn’t even know the name, thanks to zreen for telling me!

Today I googled for that name and found that can be used to heal bronchitis, is an expectorant and can be used in general to alleviate lung infections. Cool, this is exactly what I needed and I have plenty of it at home!  I’m definitely going to use it a lot in these days.

Thanks Shilpa, zreen and patrick!

No, I’m not at the concert of Depeche Mode in Bologna, even if I would love to be there.   Michele had bought a ticket for me, but I had to ask him to find someone else.  In fact he had no problem, it took him 20 minutes to confirm he had found a back up.

No, I’m not at the dinner of the acting course (did I tell you I’m now studying how to act?), even if this is the 1st dinner, called on purpose to better know each other and blend together and the other participants are all women and pretty and fun.  It is an “everybody brings something” dinner and I had prepared some specialties from the traditional Ferrarese cuisine that I’m very fond of.

I’m currently at home, idling, bored.  Unfortunately caught a flu and I have had fever and general sickness in the last 4 days.  Let’s try to find a positive side of the coin.  It was long time I didn’t have that much spare time – you can clearly see from how slow I have been posting new articles to this blog.

In the last few days days I watched some movies, caught up on some RSS feeds, including blogs of my friends, posted a lot of nonsense to facebook and added some info to my profile, listened to some music, reordered paper stuff, hacked some code for the fun of it, overslept, and also worked (email, some phone calls, a few skype chats).  In fact I can’t seem to be able to detach from the office.  At least I’m enjoing the new home (did I tell you I moved to a new flat?).

Part of my job is to select technical people to be hired in the company.  Few months ago I happened to interview a guy for a developer position.  This guy has a degree in chemistry but his career then oscillated between system administration and programming in the java world.

After a while talking about his experience he said that, being in his 30s, he was looking for some stability.  In particular, he said, he was frightened by how quickly our knowledge can become obsolete in the programming world.  For example in 5 years Java could become obsolete because everybody could move to the next big thing (.net, he said), making Java skills useless and forcing you to learn everything from scratch.  He added that system administration and programming skills in the open source world will last longer.

On one hand I agree: open source skills will last longer.  In the open source world we never have to push the new thing just to force everybody to buy the new version.  We’re not at the mercy of some company’s agenda.  We grow software incrementally, evolving technology on top of the existing good old stuff, with continuous innovation and experimentation patch after patch and using Darwinism to select stuff that works and re-use it forever.

On the other hand I think this guy doesn’t understand what programming is really about, on a deeper level. In our world technologies evolve very quickly.  Every day new emerging technologies provide better ways to do the same thing and even in the evolutionary open source world, we have to keep up with the fast-pace advancement.

That’s why good schools won’t teach you a specific programming language or a specific application or operating system.  Good schools won’t teach you the technology of the day.  They will teach you how to learn new stuff quickly, how to be your own self-teacher.  They will prepare you for a whole life of research and study.

As Jeff Atwood once wrote “how lasts about five years, but why is forever”

Last Sunday was a wonderful day with clean blue sky.  A sunny day in winter is rare and I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to enjoy the old town and take some pictures.  After almost four years living in this place I’m still impressed, expecially by some of the buildings from the middle age.  This palace, Palazzo Vecchio, was built seven centuries ago.  Can you believe it?

Last summer we were on our way back from Berlin when we took a little detour for a one day visit to Prague.  We were at the end of our vacation and didn’t expect much more from it, but after little walk in the city center I was totally hypnotized.  Surrounded by wonderful buildings, lots of people partying and having good beer down in the narrow cobble-stoned streets, no cars or any other vehicle in sight and the atmosphere felt a little like fairy tales.

I felt like I entered a different dimension in space-time and decided Prague deserved more than one day.  Unfortunately we had to come back home but I promised to myself thought I’d come back to Prague sooner or later.  A few weeks later Martina moved from Firenze to Prague and when she invited us for a visit we did not think twice.

We spent there the last weekend and found that in winter the medieval city center of this doorstep to the stars is even better, white snow everywhere and a little less tourists in the way.  Martina was very kind to be our guide and brought us to wonderful places we would have never reached otherwise, also telling us about the many juicy legends of the city such as Golem, places where you can do something to make a wish come true, devils and a water spirits with green coats living in the river, eggs being used to cement Charles Brigde and many others.

It was freezing cold so we had frequent breaks in all sorts of cafés and pubs.  One of the best places we visited is U Flekú, a famous brewery established back in 1499.  They brew their own lager, Flekovsky Tmavy Lezák, which is dark, tastes great and is not sold anywhere else in the world and also serve Becherovka a bitter liquor typical of the Czech republic.