I'll spend the next 3 weeks in Pisa, Italy, attending the "A New Kind of Science" Summer School.

I am going to spend the next few days in San Francisco.

Save complications from a nasty Chickenpox (Varicella), and if I do not scratch too much, I'll be attending the Living Technology Workshop in Odense, Denmark (March 17-18).

When I get well I'll have to prepare a 10 minutes presentation.

I am attending the First Workshop on Scientific Knowledge Creation, Dissemination and Evaluation.

The discussion is about the evolution of the scientific paper in the 21st century. There is a pretty diverse group of people attending, from accademia (computer scientists, philosophers, etc), from the industry (mainly scientific publishers), from the EU commission and random people (like me).

As usual people are split between:

If you watch this video from the BBC, you will probably agree that books will never be replaced by electronic readers because:
- you can rinse a book after accidentally dropping it in the tub
- book pages do not reflect light like e-readers do when reading at night in your bed
- you do not get mugged for a book, but you could for an e-reader
- books smell good

I am in Rimini attending the Perada Summer School; it is about pervasive adaptation ... Feels strange to be back to "school" :-)

I am in Winchester, the AlifeXI conference starts tomorrow.

An (indoor!) BBQ will take place in a few minutes. It's raining and I am looking forward to see how an indoor BBQ works ;-) that's England!

When I left this morning Milan was hot and mosquitoes would not let me sleep. It seems that I will not have these problems here.

Looking forward to see if there are any REAL viable technologies that can be used on the Internet.

I had a great time in SF, and now I am back to Milan. A few days here and then I'll be at the AlifeXI conference in the UK.

I'll be in the Bay Area for a month. This time in Mission. I like the neighborhood so far :-)

Today I finally had time to comment on this article, which three friends suggested I should read and comment.

The article is about how the way we think is being changed by new technology, the Internet and the Web. To make the point, there are a lot of good examples of how past technology shifts have changed the way we think and interact. It is the kind of article I would have written, except for the title and the conclusions.

Last Thursday I participated to a round table with President George W. Bush, while he was visiting Rome. Politics was not involved in this, I was invited to talk about 1GN, the not for profit network that we created last year to foster entrepreneurship in Italy. The transcript of my conversation with the President is online here.

This article, by Paul Graham, perfectly describes our state of mind when building Splinder into the largest blogging platform in Italy.

We focused on users, that was our compass, and we focused on usage growth, not on generating revenues, because that would have killed the project. We kept costs down and survived all the business and life odds.

While thinking about the emergence of "new rules" from simple rules and the inadequacy of mathematics to model across levels, I never thought about the implication of this line of reasoning beyond science and technology into the realm of philosophy and religion.

I am attending the Cognitive Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop which is organized by the University of Zürich and is being held in Capo Caccia, Sardinia.

The place is fantastic, and the talks are excellent.

One of the first things I noticed, when I started reading about Bio-Inspired AI and neuroscience, is the notion that we cannot say that we "really" understand something unless we find a suitable "traditional" mathematical model that approximates it in a way or another.