ahhhhh... so I was right!

I always had this strange gut feeling that pure drawinism wasn't going to be an acceptable explanation for our world. I agree that in theory it could work, but I was never able to believe that the results we observe in nature could be justified from a numeric point of view only by natural selection. With this I mean that in my opinion natural selection simply couldn't have enough strength to make the human body (just for example) such an impressive machine.
Recently when my mother had a thrombosis problem I discovered things about how our blood works that I didn't know. Just the explanation of how our body reacts to an injury trying to prevent the losing of too much blood is impressive. Just that little bit is incredibly sophisticated and requires a very precise equilibrium... too much of a value and your blood is going to coagulate when there's no injury, and you die; a value too low and your body will not be able to stop losing blood from a little cut and you also die. Thinking that such a perfection comes by mere natural section doesn't seem to me reasonable.
Yesterday I stumbled in a page that explained that exactly the machinery required to coagulate our blood when needed is a part that is hardly justifiable by natural selection. It's a chain reaction of activations of proteins where no mistake and no misregulation is allowed, and so it's hard to justify how such a system could have been evolving one step after another because in that system you can't change just one variable, you have to change several at the same time to keep the balance. In other words the idea that the system has been reached by casual mutations that produced a sequence of organisms every one better than the previous one simply doesn't work; the intermediate ones would have been not better, and so they've no reason to survive. I don't know if I like the position of Intelligent Design (even if admittedly would make things a lot easier to explain; especially if you don't make the big jump of assuming the existence of a god but just that of someone - necessarily non-human, but not necessarily super-human - that is directing or has been directing the evolution) but I'm happy to see that at least to someone else the pure theory of evolution doesn't seem plausible.
Another doubt I always had since I was a kid is about glacial periods, I wonder if indeed even that area is seriously under discussion.

where is the common sense ?

Today I downloaded a program that allows you to design reports with data extracted from an SQL database. About 600MBytes. Then the received file was indeed just self-extracting itself in a setup directory of roughly another 600MBytes. Then from this second directory you can install the program that it takes around 600 MBytes.
Oh... and just after downloading the file (only minutes later) you may want to download the service pack 1... about 140Mb.
I'm the only one that finds this just outrageous ?
Why downloading a program that then unzips in a bunch of files that then can be used for setup? Is this passage really needed ? Why asking your users to download a big outdated program from the site and then asking them to download another big chunk of corrections ? wouldn't be better to have just the version patched on the first download ? And the size itself of the program is IMO an offense to the art of programming.

Bah.

dad's back to the hospital

Sometimes life sucks. My dad has been following the diet almost perfectly and indeed the diabet last year looked under much better control. But apparently he had another serious problem and now he's back to the hospital with blood pockets attached to his body. Be nice and do your part, and you'll be run over by a truck anyway.
There must be a reason if they said that the most important thing is being healthy.

i know who i won't vote for

I'm not really into politics; but the last day I almost involuntarily listened to Romano Prodi talking on TV. First of all it was, or it was supposed to be, a popular protest against the financing law and the electoral law but was indeed just a showcase for red flags and an electoral spot for Prodi; almost nothing was said in the specific about the two issues that were supposed to be the reason for the protest.
What it was really shocking for me was however that only one message was clear... they hate Berlusconi and every single thing the current government made: the situation is dramatic and is getting worse every single minute and it's all a fault of the current government. Nothing, literally nothing, was proposed as an alternative. They never said what they would have done if being in charge... Prodi just stopped to the much easier position of "they did it wrong". Is such a pathetic non-program enough to win ? I hope not... I think not.

But this is Italy...

i hate mondays

... or, actually, I think Mondays hate me

my idea was to start the week with a positive mindset but even from the very moment I woke up I knew everything wasn't going to be perfect. It was raining like hell, and it was also damn cold in my house. Ok... it happens. While having breakfast the TV forecast said the bad weather will last until next weekend. Yay! My sneezing made me realize I'm not going to be 100% operative. My original plan was to subscribe to the swimming pool this week, but it would mean just waste a week... so I decided to postpone the subscription.
Then, with still some residual positive mindset, I went down to the box to pick up the car. I was just a bit late, as usual, not something I like but I think that counting how late I stay at work no one will even think about. Flat tire. Double Yay!. It wasn't even the same tire that gave me problems in the past... So I replaced the tire with the emergency one (getting dirty has as one can get) and drove to the tire shop. There I told them what happened and also about the other tire that slowly deflates continuously (it was used to take around 8/10 days to get to the point of being visibly deflated). That, and the current situations of the tires, made me decide to change them all. 220 euros. Triple yay!
I got to work one hour and half late on my usual late schedule, and it wasn't a really wonderful workday (but not that bad either). When coming home I burnt the topping for my pasta (and I burnt it after removing it from the fire just because I left it in the pan and took care of the cat that decided it was a nice moment to go to its bathroom - hint, if you've a persian long hair cat then try to avoid feeding it with food that implies almost liquid feces). Yay... overcooked pasta with just olive oil as topping.
When driving back to work I was kind of in a hurry... and I saw a flash on my rear mirror. It was raining as hell, of course, so *may be* it was just a lightning at distance... but I wouldn't be surprised to discover I got yesterday the first autovelox ticket in my life: I've heard it's becoming more and more common to use those devices in town and not only on extratown streets. I'm really looking forward in the mailbox for the ticket.

I hate mondays, and I'm going to spend on mondays roughly 1/7 of my life...