Feanor

As she came back from her vacations on the sea, Martina became sick.
It seems she has got this disease:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roseola
Since I do not have any little child around, I did not know about these two viruses.
I've read something about the whole Herpes family:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herpesviridae
And it is very interesting.

Besides the incredible complexity of life at the cellular level, also this is very interesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_retrovirus
"It is believed that the ancestors of modern viviparous mammals evolved after an infection by this virus, enabling the fetus to survive the immune system of the mother."
And:
"There are many thousands of endogenous retroviruses within human DNA (HERVs comprise nearly 8% of the human genome, with 98,000 elements and fragments)."
So it seems all this genetic manipulation made by wave after wave of viruses plays a big role in evolution.

Breaking news: Twitter is mostly about babbling.
http://www.pearanalytics.com/2009/twitter-study-reveals-interesting-results-about-usage/
What puzzles me is somebody did take Twitter seriously, like it was a media revolution instead of a variation of the old instant messengers. Oh but the newspapers will disappear because now the news are on Twitter.

Some interesting data:
1. International tests performed on the italian school system showed that students from the south get the poorest grades (while Italy itself is pretty low in the list). Also, universities from the south on average don't meet the (low) quality standards established by the Ministry of Education (which are probably made with south America in mind).
2. This summer, like every year, there were the school state exams. You know, those exams to move from elementary to intermediate, from intermediate to high school, etc. The statistics show students from south Italy got the better grades.
How is it possible? Easy, teachers in the south "help" the students in cheating at the exams and/or use different/easier criteria when evaluating the tests. This is a well known mechanism, in fact even the current Minister of Education, Mariastella Gelmini, got an university degree in Law in the city of Brescia (that is the extreme north) but then went to Reggio Calabria (that is in the extreme south) to (easily) pass the State exam to become a lawyer.
3. There is an additional problem. The statistics include the grades got by kids that come from families of immigrants. Their grades are usually VERY low, due to a difficult integration. Now, the fact is that in north Italy schools there are SIX times more immigrants than in the south.
4. Of course, in this "common cheating" environment most of the public employees come from south Italy, that means Post Office, Teachers, Judges, Police, University Professors, Medical Doctors, etc, and finally politicians. You think about undergoing a surgery with the surgeon who passed exams cheating all his life, or be in a Court in front of a Judge who did the same...

There are many other issues but this helps a little in case somebody still wonders why there is the political movement that aims to separate north Italy from the south...

She has been busy doing mostly this:
And sometimes this:
She is with mom and grandparents in Aprica, a known touristic town in the Valtellina valley.
Her dad comes and goes because he has to work.