Livia Iacolare

Possibly one of the best commercials I’ve ever seen.

What happens when your brain functions fade away? How does reality change? Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor experienced a massive stroke and she shares her amazingly beautiful story with the public at TED. Thanks Marjolein for linking to this precious video.

Since I was in high school I’ve always enjoyed writing poems in ottava rima (my myth is the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto). I have written quite a lot of them (each one was about twelve-fifteen stanzas), mostly to please my friends. I also write sonnets and acrostics. I like poetry made of rhymes and syllables, whereas the greatest delight derives from finding the right balance between meter and style. I think this is a way to compensate my scarce knowledge of maths, since to many people writing in verses can be as difficult as solving an equation. I’m not a fan of free verses. They are too easy and if we exclude some notable exceptions, they are mostly lame expressions of poetry.

The real challenge, to me, is to use verses to create a perfect, flawless and defined space in which emotions and actions can be freely expressed. The modern meter (from the Middle Age to now) is based on the quantity of syllables, thus meaning that verses can be identified by the number of syllables they contain (e.g. the hendecasyllable). On the other hand, the ancient meter was even more complex, since it was based on the quality of syllables. It means that poets had to carefully select words with either long or short syllables according to their needs.

Isn’t it just amazing?

A dear friend pointed me to this image, which is really funny.
In my experience, though, the problem occurrs when your employer wants you to believe that she/he is allowing you full autonomy when in reality it’s the opposite.

Here’s the source.

This is the video I have made about the Girl Geek Dinner I attended last week in Milano. It’s mostly in Italian but there are also two interviews in English. Enjoy!

P.S. Sorry about the audio (I left the microphone in the hotel room…lol)