TV series: Damages

I know this is outdated, but I just recently saw the season 1 of Damages and I must say that I had missed an excellent show, in the perfect line of content that I enjoy, which is psychological thriller. The performances of Glenn Close , Rose Byrne and Ted Danson are outstanding, in fact all of them received important nominations and awards.

In the series, each season is about a lawsuit against a big company, or a multi-billionaire, as in the case of the first season. During each episode flash-forwards images from the season finale somehow announce a fatal outcome, with a horrific music making one to think how in Earth things got to that point.

Grasping inspiration

Inspiration is an interesting word. It ultimately comes from the Latin word inspirare, and this from spiro.. both being related to the effect of breathe or carrying air into your lungs, although it was also related to live, in general, or to fill the body with something that allows one to live. Related words are spirit for example, normally used as synonym of ghost in modern language.

Religious people can say that God is a matter of inspiration. Well, even when I am not a religious person, I can believe this. Take for example one marvelous piece of music, the "Miserere mei, Deus" written by Allegri more than 300 years ago. It has been said that the pope at the time asked Allegri to write this piece for exclusive performance within the Sistine Chapel only. Nobody listened this beautiful polychoral composition outside this chapel, until the fourteen years old Mozart attended this service and re-wrote it entirely by memory!

Nice story, formidable inspiration...
More information about this can be found here.

File formats of bioinformatic programs

In bioinformatics we face the problem of manipulating huge volumes of data and most bioinformatic programs still use plain text as output. Each time a new program is released a new output format is created and new computer parsers should be programmed on every place the program is to be used. Using XML for storing outputs has started to be common in some well-known programs but it is not the best solution (for bioinformatic programs) available today. Here I show how to use SQLite in a very basic bioinformatic example.

Complete document: http://zdruid.blogspot.com/p/on-file-formats-of-bioinformatic.html

Homeland S05E08 today...

Today is "Homeland day".

Homeland is an american TV show that has been aired on Sundays in Showtime.

It is currently on the fifth season (each having 12 episodes) and today it will be aired the eight episode.

This is a really good show about spies, geopolitics and the like. Unlike some other shows about politics and spies, the protagonist here is a woman (Carry Mathison), played by the great Claire Daines.

Other great shows arguably in this line and that I have enjoyed are Rubicon, The shadow line, The Honourable Woman.

Simple manifest

Sometimes I will try to write some things here. Things most likely related to computers, science, philosophy, music, movies, TV-series, or a combination of these.
I will try to write mostly in English, although my mother tongue is Spanish. I apologize in advance for any grammatical error I may commit here.

However, I plan to write in Spanish too. For example, if I am going to write something about poetry, I will surely use Spanish.

Science, nonetheless, must be written in English. This is the language of Science today, just like Latin was until about a century ago. ---sram