Astonishing study on the Shroud of Turin

http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/en/homepage/documents/detail/articolo/sacra-sindone-holy-shroud-sabana-santa-10738/

Enea, the National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development, has published a report on five years of experiments conducted in the ENEA center of Frascati on the “shroud-like coloring of linen fabrics by far ultraviolet radiation”. “Simply put: we tried to understand how the Shroud of Turin was imprinted by an image so special that it constitutes its charm, and poses a great and very radical challenge, “to identify the physical and chemical processes capable of generating a color similar to that of the image on the Shroud.”

…

“However, Enea scientists warn, “it should be noted that the total power of VUV radiations required to instantly color the surface of linen that corresponds to a human of average height = 34 thousand billion watts makes it impractical today to reproduce  the entire Shroud image using a single laser excimer, since this power cannot be produced by any VUV light source built to date (the most powerful available on the market come to several billion watts )”.

Vasquez Rocks

Some friends picked me up early Sunday morning to head toward Agua Dulce and its amazing rock formations, the Vasquez Rocks. As I discovered reading the signs on my way out, this may be the only park in the U.S. named after a convicted criminal who was served with the death penalty. Apparently this bandit was using this area as his favorite hiding place.

Temescal Fire Road chase

As I was getting ready for a hike somewhere on Sunday I noticed an online message from OLdweeb advertising his expedition on Temescal Fire Road (in or around Topanga State Park). Since I was going to drive in that direction anyway I changed my plans and let him know I was going to try to catch up, since I was leaving home as he was parking his car.

I was about 20 minutes behind him, but once I arrived at the end of the Cheney Trail near Eagle Rock, I decided for a number of reasons to hike to the Hub from the lower section, which, as I discovered later that evening with Google Earth, is about twice as long as the upper section. As he showed me later, he had written in the dirt to suggest to turn left, but I did not notice! Our communication lines were impaired by poor reception, so by the time I was approaching the Hub I realized through one of his voicemail messages that I was now a full 30 minutes behind!

I headed south and finally caught up with him at he was ready to turn around, so we hiked back together. I totaled over 10 miles due to my detours.

Small Animal DDx Lite now downloadable from the iTunes Store (free)

The world’s first app for differential diagnosis in veterinary medicine, Small Animal DDx, now has a free (Lite) counterpart in the iTunes store. This is the fruit of my collaboration with Dr. Andrea Vercelli, a leading VMD who provided the scientific content.

Small Animal DDx is Ready for Sale

I am pleased to announce that my first (and hopefully not the last) iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch (iOS) app, possibly the world’s first app for differential diagnosis in veterinary medicine, Small Animal DDx, is now available in the iTunes store. I teamed up with Dr. Andrea Vercelli, a leading VMD who provided the scientific content, to deliver this effective differential diagnosis tool for veterinarians.

European invaders in Ahmanson Ranch

No, no, it’s a little late for a report about conquistadors roaming the area and it’s not about…

Xcode 4 and the astonishing static analyzer

Not your average development environment! Let’s see if anyone knows how to fix this with the least effort… (To enlarge, click on the picture.)

Lake Casitas

Coming soon… in the meantime, link to OLdweeb’s account of the day.

Fireline Trail in lower Big Sycamore

OLdweeb has a nice summary of our pre-Independence Day stroll… more later.

Amazon app for iPhone, tracking info bug

I recently found a bug similar to the one I had reported last year against the AAA application for the iPhone. While checking for progress on a delivery, I noticed that the tracking information was often loaded incorrectly.

I saw two completely different tracking results for the same exact package which was still being delivered.

The Amazon website accessed from my PC via IE always showed (and still shows) the Sparks, NV information. Out of 5 attempts the app showed 3 times wrong information and twice the Sparks, NV information.

The interesting detail about their development process is that unlike AAA, Amazon says that they will not respond to a bug report submitted via email (unless I am missing something):

Thank you for your feedback on the Amazon App for the iPhone and iPod touch.  Your comments have been automatically forwarded to our Mobile team.  We will take your suggestions into consideration as we make updates and plan new features.  You will not receive a response.