Learn One Thing A Day

In the mid 19th century, firemen began to use steam-powered fire engines but they were so heavy that required horses to be pulled to fires. Firehouses were usually  multi-storied and the horses lived in the stable on the ground floor while the firemen were on the upper level.  Nevertheless the horses, attracted by the smell of food eaten by the firemen, sometimes climbed the stairs. To avoid this, spiral staircases were installed because they could not be navigated by horses. Everybody happy? No because the new circular staircases also slowed down the firemen. A solution was found in 1870s, by David Kenyon, a Chicago fireman who had the idea to install a " pole " connecting the upper level(s) of the firehouse with the ground floor. And we all know, thanks to the Ghostbusters (scene below!!!), how cool it is! ;) While it is not surprising that present-day firehouses do not have staircases anymore, because, you know, horses are no longer needed, the majority of them...

This is crazy... I have just learnt that there was a war in 1896 that lasted... wait-for-it ... just 38 minutes! It was between United Kingdom and the Zanzibar Sultanate and everything happened in the morning of August, 27, 1896. Even if it lasted just 38 minutes (09:02-09:40 AM), there were about 500 causalities from the Zanzibar forces and only one British sailor was injured. As you can guess from this numbers, Zanzibar surrendered. If you want to read more on this subject, here is the wikipedia link . For the record, the longest war was the Hundred Years War between Kingdom of England and Kingdom of France. It was a series of conflicts for the control of the French throne and it went from 1337 to 1453. It is called the Hundred Years War even if it lasted 116 years. Actually from the formal point of view there has been an even longer war the Three Hundred and Thirty Five Years' War between The Netherlands and the Isles of Scilly (located off the SW southwest coast of G...

Well, the answer to this question is 17 508!!! However only about 6000 of them are inhabited and the majority of the population lives in the greatest five islands (Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, Irian Jaya and Java). No doubt that Indonesia is the country with the greatest number of islands world. For the record, there are also 583 languages and dialects spoken in the archipelago!!! Crazy numbers aren't they? References: http://ec.europa.eu/ http://geography.about.com/

Last update  April, 8th, 2018 After the post about ebooks , I have thought you may be interested on academic papers too and here I am! :) THANKS for your contributions to this post! On the subject education, there is also a new post about the free university courses you can attend online, for free!!! Anyway, if you are a PhD student or a researcher you need to download and study other people's scientific works. For most journals (the most important ones) your institution should have already a subscription. However you'll probably have already experienced that sometimes, you need a paper you cannot download through your institution, pretty annoying eh? So... how can you solve this problem? Where can you download research papers for free? Where to find free scientific journal articles? How to get that f*ck*ng full-text pdf? Are there alternatives to sci-hub ? Yes, just read below! By the way, is sci-hub down? NO, once again, just read below! I will...

The scishow and crashcourse channels on youtube are amazing! Pills of knowledge, like these ones reporting the proves supporting the theory of the evolution. Evolution is a thing! Get used to it,  Really! Don't fool yourselves! Evolution in biology Evolution for humans References are reported below the videos. I think it can be useful to watch also this video by the awesome Neil DeGrasse! The thought he suggests it's really fascinating and very disturbing at the same time.

To complete my  Matlab interface for data fitting , I  needed a Timestamp function, namely a function that combine date and time into a single string. This can be useful when you want to save files having the same base "name" but created at different times. In Matlab the timestamp is obtained with the command >> datestr(clock, 0) which output is 10-nov-2012 14:10:20 Unfortunately this string cannot be used into a filename due to the presence of colons. In addition I would like to have a string starting with "year-month-day" because it is a much more convenient  way to name files created at different times.   My version of TimeStamp that produces a string in the format : year-month-day-hours-h-minutes-m-second-s as for example 2012-11-10-14h10m20s Enjoy! ---------------------------------------------------------------- function [s]=TimeStamp %[s]=TimeStamp % time stamp in the format % year-month-day-hours-h-minutes-m-second-s % Get...

If you are using nlinfit to fit your data in Matlab, maybe you are interested (as I was) in finding an easy way to hold some of your parameters (by default there no option to do it). So how to hold, to fix some of the parameters? Looking on the internet I found this "official" solution link coming directly from the Mathworks support. It consists in re-writing a new version of nlinfit , called nlinfitsome , that fits only some of parameters.  The solution is pretty nice and clever but it has a drawback. The reason I use nlinfit over lsqcurvefit is because it makes relatively easy to get the error bars, however with the proposed solution this advantage is lost so I modified nlinfitsome to address this specific problem. My function , called mod_nlinfit , has exactly the same arguments of nlinfit and gives you as output the parameters and their error bars. I know that nlinfit has a richer output, but for my needs, having the parameters and error bars is enough. T...

Several years ago, I watched on TV the nice movie Finding Forrester (2000, Sean Connery and Rob Brown). There, the main character ("Jamal") tells a fun fact about the origin of the BMW log , the famous German Auto company. Well, he explains that it represents "blades of a plane moving into the sky". This because, at the beginning,  BMW was "mainly" devoted to construction of aircraft motors. I have took for granted that cool explanation until today, when I decided to check... and, keeping the long story short, the facts are a bit different. The truth is that blue and white represent just the colors (in reversed order) of Bavaria, the region in the South Germany where the BMW was founded. Indeed, BMW stays for Bayerische Motoren Werke i.e. Bavarian Motor Works .  Only in the 1920s people pushed the new (and cooler) interpretation. You can read more about this hoax in this interesting article by Stephen Williams on the New York Times. ...

Fortune and love befriend the bold. Publius Ovidius Naso (20 March 43 BC – AD 17/18), Roman poet known as Ovid in the English speaking world.