vertical vs horizontal city models and sustainability

There is a small article (in spanish) on this topic in today's edition of elpais newspaper.
Take a look. back to work

msnbc on the robo-sexual revolution

Some reading for this week: a nice article (msnbc link) on robot-human relationship and their future. Includes some discussion on ethical issues as well. At some point the article mentions love dolls, which reminds me of real dolls. The future, the article claims, would be something like a real doll plus some electronics.

... what if we add some electronics to... realpolitik? :-)

xkcd

After some nice time in Brasov -- doing some work -- I come back to update my blog with a link to this nice webcomic called xkcd, which I discovered looking at this most funny strip. You need to definitively take a look. The forums also seem quite interesting, dealing with topics such as math, physics or language, but also more general discussion.

lovely garden spider at high resolution

There is a new guest at our place. It's a lil' nice european garden spider (araneus diadematus). My dad took this macro picture of our new mascot: (click to enlarge)



So sweety... :-)

eluveitie + others @ Alphen aan den Rijn

Hi, just wanted to make you aware of this fine swiss folk metal band that goes by the name Eluveitie.

I had the chance yesterday to attend the Fear Dark Festivals concert at Alphen aan den Rijn where I could see them. It was my first contact with them and they are really impressive. Their variant of folk metal with death metal influences is really great and something quite refreshing in this scene. Of the other three bands that are in the list we did only see Drottnar and Thy Majestie. The problem I had with these two bands is that they abuse their own style. The Majestie plays a variant of power metal that is too bombastic and pretentious. I got really tired in the end. But then, power metal is not my fav metal stly. I've heard Drottnar labeled as christian black metal. Since I don't understand the lyrics I will not say anything about the christian thingy. But black metal? The only black that this band has is the singer style. The music itself is more closer to prog-technical death reminding me quite a bit to Cephalic Carnage, but less consistent in my view. I did not like the shrieking voice style and the on-stage presence of the band. Anyway, this style of music is difficult to get used to in the first listening, so give them a try also.

My neck hurts from headbanging today :-) Good sign!!
Anyway, anybody knows where the name eluveitie comes from??

btw, I'm listening right now to lucid interval by cephalic carnage (there are some live performances at youtube :) ) just... impressive

keepalive update... (with photos)

Hi!! No post for some weeks, eh?
well.. don't think I'm dead. I'm just incredibly busy! but still having enough fun.. things are moving on :-)

Thought that I'd put a couple of photos that I took as of late

First, here are some photos of the Koninginnedag.
This one is from Delft



And these two are from Amsterdam



This one in the Museumplein in Amsterdam



Complete change. This is a minilepel (minispoon) that I bought. The model name happens to be "Barcelona" (you can see it)! It seems to be fashionable these days to use the barcelona name. Now that AMD also did that for their new series of quad-cores :D



Again, complete change. Now some photos from my day-trip to Rotterdam last week.
The first two are just overviews from the Euromast






This is a rare building at the port whose function is unknown to me



And this is the Montevideo building (note the large 'M' on top), Netherlands' highest residential building at around 140m



And here we have a rarity: a real expresso in the netherlands ;-)



Last week we went to the Marius Escher musem in Den Haag. It was a short trip and we went back right afterwards. I only took this photo of the Hoftoren, the tallest building in The Hague (142m) and the home of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.



thats all for today I guess..
I should return to work now

see you soon!!

another week goes by...

and it's already my third week here. well, at least labor week, as I arrived on a monday. I'm still working on my first project at TUDelft and it seems end of April will be a little bit optimistic. But looking at my timing here I'm not too afraid. The kilo-vector project is more about discussion than doing implementation so I can probably overlap the two projects a little. still so.. my goal is to have it finished asap

One of the more interesting things here is how the group at TUDelft is organized compared to my department in Barcelona. What I observed so far is that there is overall a much more tight integration between teachers/professors, phd students and master students. There are two factors for this: one is the personnel distribution. From the point of view of a phd student I observe that the students per room (SPR) ratio is much lower than in barcelona. Down there we have about 8-10 students per room. There are only a couple of these large rooms and they are quite separate (even in different buildings) so the relationship between students in different offices is quite small. Often weeks if not months pass before you meet a student in a different room. As a consequence relationship (and friendship) builds mostly within the same office. The SPR ratio here is around 3. The first consequence is that office space is much more silent and quite. You can actually get some work done most of the time! The second is that relationship builds more between people from different offices since there are not enough people in one office. The second reason why there is much higher integration between students and teachers are the department politics. Social events are of great importance here. And I mean that social events receive funding. For instance yesterday our group organized a karting event. Who went there were basically phd students and master students (in a future post I may include some pics of that). At upc-barcelona the interaction between master students and phd students is inexistent. Master students are located in a single room in one of the buildings and you never get in touch with them. Ok, this comparison is not very fair since master programs are likely more tied to the department in delft than in barcelona, where they are basically tied to a project that a professor proposes. It seems to me that here the department has overall a much higher overall responsibility with master students. The higher integration between students and teachers can also be seen at lunch, where we usually share table space with some of the professors. Often our sysadmin is also there. Needless to say, this is very different compared to bcn. There you'll find many small and quite closed student circles while here there is almost like a single large group but very open and with constant fluctuations. At least at lunch master students don't come to eat with us others :-)

For today I decided to post some pictures of Schveningen where we went to the beach last weekend and some pictures of Delft

To start, this is a view of the beach at Schveningen. Amazing how many people are out there. C'mon, this is April! In the Netherlands!




Guess who's the funny guy here... a little white still, don't you think? :-)



Obligatory PIC of the Faculteit Elektrotechniek, Wiskunde en Informatica of TUDelft. This pic I actually took on april 2nd, my first day in Delft. As you can see it was 5 minutes to four as I was arriving to the building.



A canal in Delft close to zuidpoort. not the nicest canal but the only image I could find :P



The niewe kerk (new church)



And the oude kerk (old church). As you can see, due to terrain conditions in netherlands it's no longer completely vertical



that's it for today :)
have a good weekend there!