Well, it seems that it's making it descend from about 86% of the total deaths to about 81% so far, and that's great news! I thought I would share this little data science experiment I've been working on during the weekend. I hope it can bring someone some optimism for the future. https://github.com/rgargente/covid_over_70s_deaths/blob/master/covid/covid.ipynb If you… Continue reading How is COVID-19 vaccination affecting the rate of over 70s deaths?
Since I started studying space science I got interested in life in extreme environments. Extremophiles are species that not only survive but thrive in environments that we previously thought were unable to host life. This is interesting because some of the extreme environments on Earth that we now know have life are not that different… Continue reading Yet again, we discover that life is possible in places we thought it wasn’t
It's been a while since I share anything here but I thought these examples about the Discrete Fourier Transform might be worth a post here. Here's the intro to the tutorial, and the link: https://github.com/rgargente/exdft/blob/master/notebooks/exdft01.ipynb There are plenty of good explanations about both the math and the application of the Discrete Fourier Transform (or DFT)… Continue reading Understanding the Discrete Fourier Transformation with small examples. A Python tutorial.
Today I'm sharing another open source contribution for the flight simulation community. The Dynamic Campaign Engine for DCS has been suffering issues about AI not attacking targets for months. I decided to investigate the issue and try to implement a solution. I found out the problem is more related to the simulation AI than the… Continue reading A workaround for the DCS flight simulator Dynamic Campaign Engine
I decided to create my very first development video tutorial. It has been quite an interesting experience and also a lot more work than I had imagined (I guess than this being the first time doesn't make it any easier). I talk about Test Driven Development, how to get started with it, and why I… Continue reading The TDD mindset: a video tutorial
When I started thinking about developing some little things for the X-Plane fligtht simulator I had to start thinking about it as a development platform, and not just a simulator. It has a powerful C++ SDK that is reasonably well documented. Pretty cool stuff. What I didn't expect is that X-Plane would become a great… Continue reading Developing plugins for X-Plane
UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd took a very strong position against WhatsApp and other apps providing end to end encryption to their users during an interview on BBC yesterday. She said she finds it unacceptable that terrorists can use that to "hide" and that the security services should be able to access WhatsApp conversations. It is not my… Continue reading Why governments getting access to private WhatsApp conversations is a terrible idea
Yesterday's NASA announcement about the discovery of 7 Earth sized exoplanets in the Trappist-1 system is all over the news. People seem understandably excited, and even Google celebrated creating a brand new doodle just hours after the announcement. And as usual with scientific news, you can find quite a lot of confusion around. So what does… Continue reading What the Trappist-1 exoplanets discovery means… and doesn’t mean
More than two years ago, when I was starting this blog, I wrote a little post about Rosetta waking up. It was exciting to follow its progress during this time. Time flies and today the guys in Darmstadt flew it into the comet it's been orbiting all this time, thus ending its mission. Rosetta has been one of… Continue reading Rosetta ends its mission
I’ve seen factory classes used in several of the projects I’ve worked on and in my experience they are misused more often than not. Please note that I am talking about factory classes, not the factory pattern itself, which is useful in more cases. Let me explain. One of the most important Object Oriented design… Continue reading Factory classes are (very often) a bad design choice
Space, Science and Software 