Washington DC

November 23rd, 2006

Washington DC is an interesting city. The first impact was with Union Station that is a bit old and messy… but starting from the underground (or Metro as it is called there) the things change. The Metro is really well organized and well mantained. The city is in general really clean with a lot of impressive buildings (most of them are governative/administrative). The mall is a big green area sorrounded by incredible museums (all for free). The majority of them are grouped in the world’s largests museums complex called “Smithsonians“.

The Mall The White House The Lincoln Memorial

But the thing I noticed is that there are only a few people around… it is a sort of beautiful empty city.

Wish I could fly

November 21st, 2006

Ten days ago I was walking in the Baltimore harbour and some people were learning to fly:

Fly Fly Fly

Then I’ve been sitting on a bench for a while, looking at the seagulls:

Fly Seagulls Seagull

Some days after, I was at the Washington DC space museum:

Apollo Plane Plane

Wish I could fly…

Times Square

November 19th, 2006

Times square in New York is one of those places you cannot imagine until you visit it. It is something in between reality and fantasy. I took some pics in there and I put “Lights and Ghosts” as title of the album… Pictures seem unreal, I would say they look like drawings.

Times Square Times Square Times Square

If you are used to play pool…

November 6th, 2006
Laser pool cue … you couldn’t proabably live without this Laser-Guided Pool Cue

“This is the first laser-guided regulation-sized pool cue. When activated, the harmless visible laser provides a precise guide for lining up the perfect shot with pinpoint accuracy.

… and for only $59.95 you’ll be a champion! This is what you can learn while flying in USA ;)

Time to go…

November 4th, 2006

After this one month and a half in Boston it’s time to pack my stuff and to travel again…

Me walking in Charles Street

October in Boston

November 2nd, 2006

And October is over… here another bunch of pictures of this month. Enjoy!.

Charles Street Boston Common Reflections Boston by night

ehm… scary?

November 2nd, 2006

Tonight I’ve been in Harvard for attending the talk: “Intelligence Will Underlie Everything of Value” by Ray Kurzweil.

Leading inventor Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. His latest book, The Singularity is Near, was a New York Times best seller.

I am reporting here some quotes:

  • “with nanotechnologies we can inject into the the blood artificial red cells that can carry more oxigen in the body. A person could run the olimpic final of 100 meters without breathing”
  • “in the near fufure it will be possible to switch on/off genes responsible for diseases and not only”
  • “it will be possible to take cells out of the human body, reprogam them and put them back in their place”

But it was more scary the idea that Moore’s law is valid not only for electronic evolution but for everything. Accordng to Kurzweil, medicine and genomics will grow exponentially because of technology improvements. For instance, because of the new CT scan we will have it will be possible to do the reverse engineering of the brain and to reproduce the brain functionalities with computers (i.e. intelligence). No matter what will happen, growing is exponential. Also people life expectancy is growing exponentially.

Thus, it seems we will have super-humans able to live a really long life and intelligent machines able to think as humans… doubts? According to Kurzweil he has been always right… isn’t it scary?

MIT Stata Center

November 1st, 2006

The Stata Center is one of the most interesting building at the MIT (Massachusetts iInstitute of Technology). It is one of my favourite places to work too. The building is home to the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). And there are some other new cool buildings around (The evolving MIT campus).

Stata Center Stata Center Stata Center Stata Center